An Interview with Kelly Link: “All Books Are Weird”

Weirdfictionreview.com: Was weird fiction welcome in your household growing up? And what kinds of weird things did you read as a child?

Kelly Link: My parents were both big readers. There are only two books I remember my mother taking away from me. One was Bored of the Rings. The other was A Confederacy of Dunces. As a child, everything seemed pretty weird, and that was good: Clan of the Cave Bear, Flowers in the Attic, Grimbold’s Other World, The Lord of the Rings, The Dark Is Rising sequence, the Greek and Norse myths, Stephen King, Joan Aiken, Saki, Margaret Storey, the Earthsea books, M. R. James, Dracula, Stranger in a Strange Land, Michael de Larrabeiti’s Borrible novels, Diana Wynne Jones, The Amityville Horror, Reader’s Digest’s Strange Stories, Amazing Facts. Oh, and we had a large record collection of musicals. Godspell, My Fair Lady, Camelot. Musicals: pretty weird. If you were to do an archeological dig for formative influences, all of the above would be a start. And yes, I maintain that all of these books are weird.