Kate Folk

A thrilling new voice in fiction injects the absurd into the everyday to present a startling vision of modern life. “Wondrously perverse, often creepy and hilarious, and always sneakily heartbreaking.”—Chang-Rae Lee With a focus on the weird and eerie forces that lurk beneath the surface of ordinary experience, Kate Folk’s debut collection is perfectly pitched to the madness of our current moment. A medical ward for a mysterious bone-melting disorder is the setting of a perilous love triangle. A curtain of void obliterates the globe at a steady pace, forcing Earth’s remaining inhabitants to decide with whom they want to spend eternity. A man fleeing personal scandal enters a codependent relationship with a house that requires a particularly demanding level of care. And in the title story, originally published in The New Yorker, a woman in San Francisco uses dating apps to find a partner despite the threat posed by “blots,” preternaturally handsome artificial men dispatched by Russian hackers to steal data. Meanwhile, in a poignant companion piece, a woman and a blot forge a genuine, albeit doomed, connection. Prescient and wildly imaginative, Out There depicts an uncanny landscape that holds a mirror to our subconscious fears and desires. Each story beats with its own fierce heart, and together they herald an exciting new arrival in the tradition of speculative literary fiction.

Stories

Out There

Krys C

We discovered the house's beating heart after Margaret poured the dregs of her papier-mache project down the kitchen drain. The rest of us were in our bedrooms on the second floor, slogging through graduate coursework, when the thumping began. With each beat, the floorboards throbbed. The thin walls trembled, paint sloughing off in broad flakes. 

The next morning, the sleep clinic doctor is nestled in bed between you and your boyfriend. The doctor is bound and gagged, his moist blue eyes blinking up at you. Your boyfriend must have sleepwalked to the car, sleep-driven to the doctor's house, and sleep-kidnapped the doctor. Presumably he first had to sleep-look-up the doctor's address. 

Out There quotes

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