A master of short stories delivers a rather long one

Kelly Link is a genius. That’s not just my opinion. In 2018, Link won a $625,000 “genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Her strange and surreal short stories – along with books published by Small Beer Press, which she co-founded with her husband – have transfigured the genre of fabulist fiction. Her 2015 collection, “Get in Trouble,” was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Last fall, The Washington Post named her “White Cat, Black Dog” one of the year’s best works of science fiction and fantasy. It was the only story collection to make the list.

With her reputation for wonderment, every new book by Link arrives trailing clouds of enchantment. And given the assumption that novels rank higher on the scale of being than short stories – a fallacy driven mostly by marketing considerations – Link’s first novel has generated outsize interest. She has obliged by delivering an outsize novel.

At 628 pages, “The Book of Love” is a book to contend with, a tome that thunders: “I Am Not a

Short Story!” Adding to its epic aura, all the chapters announce themselves as parts of some fantastical bible, emblazoned with headings like “The Book of Daniel,” “The Book of Laura” and “The Book of Mo.”

With this story for adults, Link is wending her way through an old-growth forest of fantasy novels that stretches from “Harry Potter” to “The Chronicles of Narnia,” adventures in which a small group of young people must confront a dark challenge and a maniacal adversary. But she’s also cutting her own distinctly Linkian path by following the struggles of modern-day teens as they figure out who they are and who they love in an unstable world shimmering with deception.

The action begins in a swirl of mysteries in the seaside town of Lovesend, Mass. Three friends trapped in some kind of nether realm – “a blotted, attenuated, chilly nothingness” – have suddenly been returned to life after eddying around “like conturbations of dust.” Almost a year after they vanished from town, Daniel, Laura and Mo find themselves in their high school music room late at night. They’re dressed in costumes from “Bye Bye Birdie,” which, all things considered, may be worse than death.

“Something very strange has been happening,” Mo says.

“But it’s okay now,” Laura insists. “Isn’t it?”

No, it’s not OK. And it’s about to get much less OK.

“You are as you were,” their music teacher, Mr. Anabin, declares. “I made you out of yourselves, what you were and had been.” Even by the standards of high school music teachers, Mr. Anabin sounds unusually grandiose. When he waves his hands around, he’s not just conducting music; he’s conjuring living beings from thin air. (He’s mostly good at this, though he does accidentally put one of Laura’s ears on Daniel’s head.) He’s also got an extraordinary companion named Bogomil that looks like a dog or possibly a wolf.

“It opened its jaws and panted,” Link writes. “It shimmied as if shucking off a too-tight dress, stretching and flexing, emitting little whining noises of discomfort, and then there was a person instead of a dogwolf-thing, on his hands and knees upon the floor, person mouth split open in an airless yawn.” Lauren notes that he is the handsomest man she’s ever seen, and yet he’s deeply unnerving. “There was something about the sound of his dirty feet on the floor that was the worst thing yet. His expression did not change, but the sound suggested contact with the world was agony. As if whatever Bogomil was made of – surely not flesh? – rejected the contact even as it occurred. Or did the floor, that unremarkable linoleum, reject Bogomil? Yes. The whole room, in a kind of agony, refuted Bogomil. He was smiling. But every footfall was a strike on a bell stopped with mud. A clot of blood trembling on a rusted wire.”

There it is: the acidic elixir that makes drinking up Link’s work such an intoxicating treat.

The three reconstituted students are dazzled with horror and confusion when Mr. Anabin explains that they died almost a year ago. He and Bogomil will let them remain among the living if they agree to a trial. “Something educational,” Mr. Anabin proposes. “Perhaps a series of tests.”

And so, with a touch of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” snark, Daniel, Laura and Mo return to their homes, where they find that their families have been bewitched into believing that they weren’t dead but only abroad for the year, studying music in Ireland. While dealing with their spellbound relatives, the trio must try to pass the cryptic test that Mr. Anabin and Bogomil have set for them and figure out how they died during their last musical performance.

But of course, they’re also young people with all their previous anxieties, questions and desires. Daniel feels burdened with the responsibilities of caring for his many siblings in a chaotic home that’s about to burst at the seams. Laura struggles to get along with her touchy sister. And Mo, a rare African American in Lovesend, is grieving the recent loss of his grandmother, a writer who found fame and fortune in the largely white world of romance novels. (The chapter that describes her death is a tour de force that demonstrates once again what a wonder Link is in miniature.)

Delay and confusion don’t serve the novel’s fantastical mythology well, either. We learn – I’m saving you hours here – that the world beyond this one contains a series of doors.

The details are vague, but it sounds as though the afterlife is something like a storm door display at Home Depot. Each one of these doors has two guards and requires a special key. A particularly nasty goddess named Malo Mogge – “a hurricane with a narcissistic personality complex” – has lost her key, and if it’s not found, she’ll incinerate the town of Lovesend.

In other words, this whole enormous plot hangs on the fact that Malo

Mogge can command the powers of the universe, but she can’t get an Apple AirTag for her keychain. That feels both overly complicated and essentially silly, especially in contrast to the

varieties of grief that the three resurrected students are contending with.

I fell back in love with this novel during the last 100 pages. As Link soars toward the end, her wizardry gains strength. With an eye toward landing the perfect finale, the story swells with excitement. A spectacular murder and a little cannibalism don’t hurt either. After all, where would any love story be without that?