When you meet such creations as a handbag that contains an entire village or a mini-mart patronized by zombies, you know you're in a Kelly Link story. Sit back and enjoy the ride, because the twists and turns are as unpredictable as they are enjoyable. Link has built a serious cult following with her uncanny and affecting fiction; she flirts with fable, fantasy, and horror, but stands shoulder to shoulder with the best of short-story writers. After two collections, Link's new book, Pretty Monsters, is targeted at young adults — though she hasn't turned down her sublime strangeness one bit. Link spoke with Boldtype's Toby Warner about what makes readers of all ages tick, why Tolkien terrified her, and her fondness for the humble octopus.

Boldtype: This is your first collection that's pitched at young adults. Was there a change in your approach to writing these stories?

Kelly Link: Most of these stories (with the exception of "The Specialist's Hat") were originally written with a young-adult audience in mind. So the protagonists are young adults. No stories about marriage or adultery or middle-aged poker players. There may be slightly fewer experimental riffs.

I tried to write the kind of stories that I would have enjoyed reading when I was 14 or 15 — which is to say the kind of stories that I still enjoy reading. Ghost stories; stories in which the fantastic spills over into the real world; stories where the characters can behave in realistically complicated and eccentric ways.

BT: Are there things about telling a good story that kids or teenagers understand instinctively, but which many adults often forget?

KL: All that matters is that the stakes are high, that the voice and the world feel genuine, and that the story isn't dumbed down. When you're a kid, you know when you're being condescended to. You also know that stories about aliens and vampires and dark lords and armored bears and high-school cliques and children who get locked up in an attic by their evil grandmother are all stories that represent high entertainment value. This is undoubtedly a gross generalization, but I suspect young-adult readers care less about genre distinctions.

Stories about finding a community where you fit in are a kind of salve for being stuck in high school, which is why fantasy novels about a band of unlikely but faithful companions who save the world are so popular. Social information also has a lot of value when you're a kid. Gossip, urban legends, and stories about embarrassing moments are the kinds of stories that you use to figure out how to navigate the smaller world you're currently boxed in, as well as the larger world that one day you'll escape into.

BT: Many of your protagonists in this collection are young people who find themselves in strange new situations. What draws you to this type of story?

KL: The narrative possibilities, of course! Young-adult protagonists are more likely to act impulsively, because they haven't figured out yet that avoiding trouble is the best way of avoiding trouble. Their actions can be outsized in ways that feel emotionally true, and also sympathetic, even to adult readers. It also feels truer on the level of metaphor that someone who is in that transitional phase, between childhood and adulthood, has better access between the supernatural and natural world — or maybe that someone in that place is a kind of conduit for strangeness. Think of teenaged girls and poltergeists, for example.

BT: In your stories, fairy-tale-like plots often seem to go hand in hand with horror overtones. What's the connection for you?

KL: This is a pretty natural connection. Fairy tales delight in the grotesque: the father who cuts off his daughter's arms; the wicked queen who gets rolled down the hill in a nail-studded barrel or is made to dance in red-hot shoes; the white cat who asks the prince to cut off her head. The prince in Rapunzel has his eyes poked out by thorns.

BT: What was the first story that truly scared you?

KL: That's a great question! I'd have to ask my mother to be sure, but I know that I was terrified by the description of the Black Riders in The Fellowship of the Ring. My dad read the whole [Lord of the Rings] trilogy to me when I was in kindergarten, and even worse than the Black Rider was the moment in which Pippin drops a stone down a well in the mines of Moria and a drum starts up, far below; and then when they come across the blood-covered, burnt book that reveals the horrible fate of the colony of dwarves.

My sister and I both loved a picture book called Teeny Tiny and the Witch Woman. There was a drawing of a house in a forest surrounded by a fence made of human bones, and another drawing of the witch's long, long fingers reaching out toward the bed where Teeny Tiny was supposed to be sleeping. We spent a lot of time poring over those pages. There was another picture book written and illustrated by Tomi Ungerer, called The Beast of Monsieur Racine, and we loved finding all of the bizarre details in the illustrations — a man with an axe stuck in his head in a crowd scene; a woman with a green face.

BT: Pretty Monsters lives up to its name with a host of strange creatures; they all have such emotional complexity. What's your favorite kind of inhuman creature and why?

KL: Thank you! I'm very fond of the octopus. I like how it lurks. If we're talking about monsters, then I suppose inhuman rules out zombies, werewolves, and vampires. So I'll go with the kelpie — the horse that, once you've mounted it, rides into the nearest lake to drown you. I'd also recommend Fantagraphic Books' terrific bestiary, BEASTS.

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