Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
Kim Fu
Coach House Books, 2022
Review by Simon Lowe
Canadian author Kim Fu’s timely, genre-exploiting collection of short stories, Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, is a weird, mind blowing examination of identity and human relationships within the swirling black hole of modernity. In its pages, teenagers grow wings, spouses are killed and resurrected by 3-D printers, and entire lives are lived by the turn of a dial. What might seem like a series of smart, Black Mirror style vignettes, Fu’s dystopian fables run much deeper; they aren’t actually about technology or disease, those well known monsters of the 21st century, but tales of the human condition, tattered and uncertain of itself. Over a dozen stories, characters fail to connect to one another or themselves, awash in dream states, consumed by lassitude, despairing or disinterested in who they are.
In Time Cubes, Alice, known as a Depressive Insider, lives and works in a mall. She never leaves its towers, not even bothering to witness the natural light from the busy skybridges where “everyone pressed to the gaps in the open fencing, staring at the dim red medallion of sun or moon.” When Alice’s Depressive Specialist suggests she could be cheered by meaningless sex, Alice scrolls a dating app but quickly forgets why she is on her phone, “comforted by the light of the screen and the swiping gestures, the same ones that soothed her as an infant.” The sense of drifting and purposelessness, a state of ennui, continues in Sandman, where an insomniac office worker admits how “unbroken stretches of consciousness, days sometimes blurring into one another, seemed just a feature of modern life, not worth complaining about.” In This Fantasy describes a woman dreaming of bawdy erotic episodes and period romps—but rather than a participant, she is the old, graying owner of a Regency estate who observes the excitement from afar, “childless, unloved, reclusive, but a landowner.” In the 21st century we feel so sapped, so ineffectual, that we don’t bother to go outside—we accept not sleeping as normal, and prefer to watch others engage in fun.
The internal bleaching of our senses runs alongside the theme of modern relationships—their ability to bring us together and launch us further apart. In Liddy, First to Fly, a group of high schoolers are intrigued when one of the group starts to grow wings on her lower legs. This is not a Gregor Samsa moment of alienation and repulsion, but a bonding experience between young girls, shaped by intrigue and togetherness. Aware that their bodies will soon be changing and that “boys would suddenly become intriguing, infuriating, and looking at them would make us sweat our new, ranker sweat,” this surprising bodily development causes the opposite effect, where “boys see[m] more distant, less interesting.” Perhaps the high schoolers are evolving beyond puberty, beyond heteronormative states, becoming organically improved women, the first to be ready for the modern world.
Despite the futuristic magic realism of many of the stories in Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, Fu’s message is urgent, relevant, and real—she is interested in the way relationships enrich, damage, and mislead. When Martha moves to a new area in June Bugs, her rented house is shoddy and “witchily narrow,” but large and all hers. A mass infestation of beetles that “flocked to whatever room she was in” suggests the beginning of a horror story—a lonely young woman terrorized by bugs. But rewind five years, and we learn that Martha has fled an abusive relationship; she is the victim of violence at the hands of an unlikely tormentor. At first, the gathering beetles feel like more harassment for Martha; but when her abuser tracks her down, they appear to serve a different purpose altogether.
In Bridezilla, Leah is escaping ordinariness rather than violence. About to get married for no obvious reason other than to acquiesce to conventional living—surrounded by friends who “[think of] themselves as free-love bohemians, despite having all ended up in monogamous, long term, two-person relationships, despite mostly working in corporate jobs and at universities”— Leah can’t help but seek a release. At the same time, a monster has been discovered in the sea, “a harmless cannibal” which features on the news each day, traversing the planet’s oceans, searching for something or somebody, and making its way towards a place in the Pacific where, on a harbour cruise, Leah is due to be wed. The impossibility of a traditional relationship—a 20th century artifact—is apparent in every one of these tales, whether characters are running from monsters or choosing to swim towards them.
For Fu, modernity is marked by a confusion of emotions. In the opening story, a woman seeks an opportunity to experience time with her deceased mother through an AI simulation, but is told it will not be possible due to the ethics of the tech company: “it has proven to be too addictive.” A ride on a unicorn, on the other hand, is actively encouraged. The final story details a bizarre occurrence where most people can no longer taste in the usual, pleasurable way; all of a sudden, noodles taste like plastic and apples like ice. A conceptual artist recreates the sensation of eating soft-poached eggs and is accused of exploiting the vulnerable. This is a generation caught in the liminal space between shifting epochs, trying to cope with their knowledge of the past while a very different future closes in.
The dualism of mind and body, the way our physical and internal selves alter in the wake of biological and technological change, is beautifully laid out. Fu’s prose is bright and lyrical; she makes the supernatural every-day with clarity and ease reminiscent of Kelly Link or Samanta Schweblin. Her stories have a deep level of understanding of what the future could mean for the people trapped inside it. Fu is a writer out there on her own, investigating the places in time and space that require our attention. Kafka said, “We should only read the books that wound and stab us.” This collection hurts indelibly—but for all the right reasons.
Simon Lowe is a British writer. His stories have appeared in AMP, EX/Post, Breakwater Review, Storgy and elsewhere. His novel, The World is at War, Again (Elsewhen Press) was published in 2021. He regularly reviews books for Full Stop. Find him on Instagram @lowelovesbooks, on Twitter @simondavidlowe, or on his website.