A Book a Day: Kate Folk: Out There

I play it. There are more than 2 months left until the end of the year, but I dare to say that out there It will be on my best of 2024 list, at least in the short story category. And Kate Folk’s first book has been a surprise: stories with risky and original starting points, with beginnings of those that grab you by the lapel, with good development of the plots and subplots and endings to match.

The house needed humidity. That’s what he said to Karl. (beginning of The wet house)

I have this idea of ​​going into the forest and getting shot. (beginning of doe eyes)

At night, our bones dissolve in our blood like sugar in tea. (beginning of The bone pavilion)

There are fifteen texts that make up out therea volume in which thematic and stylistic unity can be seen, something that does not always occur in story books. Themes such as loneliness, love (or the search for love), insecurity, lack of communication or pain run through practically all of the texts starring, for the most part, women of about 30-40 years old who live in apparently dystopian worlds. (who wouldn’t fall in love with a blot, eh?) but terribly real, grotesque and absurd worlds that are still the other side (or perhaps the same) of interior worlds in collapse.

In the generic aspect, Folk plays with the dystopian, the terrifying and the grotesque, although almost always beginning with touches of black humor. But the initial smile fades as we progress through the texts and gives way to a rather uneasy feeling, due to the infinite sadness they leave in their wake.

As with any collection of stories, its valuation would be something like an arithmetic mean. In the case of out there, I think that longer texts have a higher general level than shorter ones. Although the 10 pages of doe eyes or that the 4 pages of Your boyfriend the sleepwalker They are impressive in their different explorations of the search for meaning and are notable, the texts that border on (or reach) the outstanding are those in which the author opts for greater development of the characters, for the introduction of different layers, for the use of contexts and subtexts as important as the most “visible” ones.

Thus, Kate Folk achieves with out there y The Big Sur (I like that circularity of the book), The refuge, The bone pavilion o The Wife of the Wind those murky and strange atmospheres that, whether imperceptible or not, surround and condition us.

Finally, and in case anyone needs references, there are three authors that come to mind: Shirley Jackson, Mariana Enriquez and Edmundo Paz Soldán. Can you imagine the reasons?