BOOKS: The descent

Photo: Joanne Chan

At 25, Karen Russell finds herself in an enviable position. Though she just graduated from Columbia’s M.F.A. writing program in May, her work has already appeared in The New Yorker, and her first collection of stories, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, is about to be published by Knopf. That’s a lot of war spoils for someone so young. Of course, most writers her age haven’t yet matched Russell’s chief achievement: honing a voice so singular and assured that you’d willingly follow it into dark, lawless territory. Which, as it happens, is exactly where it leads us.

Written mostly while Russell was at Columbia, the ten stories in St. Lucy’s isolate moments of revelation, setting them against the backdrop of ancient and ineffable expanses: the ocean, the sky, a glacier, sleep. The tales frequently hinge on an uneasy alliance between adolescents whose parents are physically or otherwise absent; often, they contain folkloric or mythological elements; almost invariably, they acknowledge the sense of isolation that accompanies any major insight. Buoyed by wit and a robust sense of the perverse, the stories are so immediately entertaining that we’re hardly aware of their looming scale—until we’re wrecked by it.

Russell grew up in Miami, and several of the pieces in St. Lucy’s are set in a somewhat surreal version of Florida—one that bears little resemblance to the state best known for spring break, Epcot and dubious election results. “Florida’s so bizarre, but as a kid I had no idea,” the author says, sitting in a park near her Washington Heights apartment. “You go to Parrot Jungle and you smile for pictures, or you go to the Seaquarium and get splashed by a killer whale surrounded by synchronized swimmers. But it can feel like a really old place, too—go to the Everglades, and it’s just strange, primal terrain.”

She mines this vision of her home turf in “Haunting Olivia,” which follows a pair of young brothers as they trawl underwater caves in search of their missing sister. Part childhood ghost-hunt, part attempt at emotional absolution, the story weaves the boys’ bravado and vulnerability into a jarring study of submersion in its various forms. The collection also reveals a near-superstitious reverence for nature’s primordial mysteries and threats. In “Accident Brief, Occurrence # 00/422,” a plane crash strands members of a boys’ choir on top of a glacier, where they await rescue or death. “There is nothing up here, no points of reference,” remarks the narrator. “On a glacier, the ground is just an illusion, a slick disguise for a million chasms.”

Other stories function as elegant cautionary parables, detailing the consequences of violating the natural order. In the title story, a group of girls with werewolf parents sublimate their animal instincts in favor of domestication by nuns, and the results are devastating. Another story, “The Star-Gazer’s Log of Summer-Time Crime,” tracks three teenagers’ attempts to lure baby sea turtles astray—a casual amusement that escalates into something far more sinister.

Never pushing any particular moral agenda, Russell is more concerned with observing the perps than with punishing them. “I’m interested in how at some point a reversal happens, how something that starts out as a joke is replaced by this out-of-control, dervishy feeling, and the joke can start to write you,” she says. “And how sometimes, the further you commit to a course of action, the less control you have over it.”

The book swims through some murky psychic soup, and Russell confesses to sometimes being baffled by the work she produces. “So many writers allude to the muse or the duende or develop other mystical explanations about where good writing comes from, and I think this speaks to the fact that writing often does feel like taking dictation from another planet, or a chorus of voices inside you that you didn’t know existed,” she explains. “I feel like a lot of these stories happened in spite of me, like they were unruly children who rejected my well-intentioned but lame ambitions for them. Sometimes I’d think I was going to write a story that was merely comic, and then it would take a spooky or unnerving turn.”

This fall, Russell will be busy writing her first novel, which grew out of the St. Lucy’s story “Ava Wrestles the Alligator.” The frenzy of accolades is likely to build when the collection is released, but for now, the author dismisses all the fuss. “Somebody recently asked me when I realized I could make my living as a writer, and I laughed and laughed,” Russell says. “Like, I’ll let you know when that happens, lady!”

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (Knopf, $22) comes out Monday 11.

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The descent | Prose parade | Q&A: Richard Powers | Establishment party