Telltale Weekly has just released a free MP3 reading of Kelly Link's amazing story "The Girl Detective." Kelly's work leaves me jaw-dropped and gob-smacked, and I rate "The Girl Detective" up there with her Nebula-winning, Hugo-nominated novella Magic For Beginners (read this now, run don't walk).
This story also appears in Kelly's Creative Commons-licensed collection Stranger Things Happen.
The girl detective's mother is missing.
The girl detective's mother has been missing for a long time.
The underworld.
Think of the underworld as the back of your closet, behind all those racks of clothes that you don't wear anymore. Things are always getting pushed back there and forgotten about. The underworld is full of things that you've forgotten about. Some of them, if only you could remember, you might want to take them back. Trips to the underworld are always very nostalgic. It's darker in there. The seasons don't match. Mostly people end up there by accident, or else because in the end there was nowhere else to go. Only heroes and girl detectives go to the underworld on purpose.
There are three kinds of food.
One is the food that your mother makes for you. One is the kind of food that you eat in restaurants. One is the kind of food that you eat in dreams. There's one other kind of food, but you can only get that in the underworld, and it's not really food. It's more like dancing.
