Reviewed by Gwenda Bond

In the two decades since Karen Joy Fowler’s remarkable first novel Sarah Canary appeared, the four others she’s published have occasionally overshadowed the fact that she’s just as skilled at crafting remarkable short stories. Maybe because her pieces of short fiction are likely to show up in Asimov’s, F&SF or Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and to explore the tragic and comic human condition by way of an ancient mummy’s curse (“Private Grave 9”) or the trajectory of a cult that claims to make its members immortal (“Always”), her stories seem to remain largely genre’s secret. They frequently win Nebula Awards, but get overlooked by the Best American Short Stories anthology.

Her new collection What I Didn’t See and Other Stories (Small Beer Press), the first since 1997’s Black Glass, should help bring her short work out of the shadows. The past decade has seen the term “literary” returning to a broader definition and seen Fowler herself hit the New York Times’ bestseller list with The Jane Austen Book Club (in which the male romantic lead is a devoted science fiction fan). This seems an ideal time for new readers to discover Fowler’s short stories. For the rest of us, the new collection provides a welcome reminder that her stories are different but equal pleasures to her longer work.

And what pleasures there are.

The twelve stories included here have a rare authenticity about them–they feel just strange enough to prove true. This effect is heightened by Fowler’s sly mixture of the real and the invented. Published here for the first time, “Booth’s Ghost” briefly chronicles the career of Edwin Booth, the prominent actor brother of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth, providing a tantalizing glimpse of the ghost who haunts him. As haunting as any ghost is “The Pelican Bar,” which follows teenage Norah through her years at an island “reform school” that may not be run by humans, where she clings to the title’s vision of escape, a small restaurant in the ocean. The story is drawn from places all too real, and the contrast between the idyllic Pelican Bar and the horrors inflicted on Norah by Mama Strong create a powerful commentary on the nature of torture. As Mama Strong tells Norah near the piece’s end, “Humans do everything we did. Humans do more.” And, of course, the title story “What I Didn’t See” was inspired by an actual 1920s gorilla hunting expedition attended by James Tiptree Jr.’s mother, and is in conversation with one of Tiptree’s most famous stories, “The Women Men Don’t See.”

When “What I Didn’t See” was originally published at Sci Fiction, an online firestorm erupted, led by a vocal critic upset the story lacked obvious genre elements. The story went on to win a Nebula, but it’s worth noting that the very quality protested helps give Fowler’s short fiction power. She refuses to engage fantastic elements in an expected way, often confining them to the edges of a story, leaving the choice of how real a character’s perception is to the reader. Her work reflects how strange and unpredictable life is, how difficult–perhaps impossible–to fully understand. This approach is clear in stories like “The Dark,” whose narrator weaves a tale of plague, lost children and government conspiracy to an unsettling end, or “The Last Worders,” which follows two friends as they search San Margais, a riverless town defined by its river, for a poetry slam that might really be “to the death.” But not every story unsettles with ambiguity. “King Rat,” the fable-like autobiographical piece that ends the book, is a true, devastating story told with no fantasy to soften its edges.

Still, for all that darkness tinges much of Fowler’s work, humor is nearly always present as a counterweight. In “Familiar Birds” the devoted one-upmanship of a young girl’s friend proves hilarious (“My mother says your mother never really wanted children”), and in “The Marianas Islands” a girl observing her grandmother’s eccentric friends delivers irresistible observations like this one: “The Great Unknown prides himself on hard-headed skepticism.”

Reading the stories in this collection is an odd and compelling experience. You feel as if you’ve been invited to a dinner party and seated next to a stranger. A stranger who decides–for mysterious reasons–to tell you the most fascinating stories you could ever imagine. You can’t decide whether the person is lying or telling the truth, but, ultimately, you realize you don’t care. Her stories are just too good.