Russell has created eight new theme parks in her stories eight new cages of horror and heart and winding metamorphoses that would take a normal writer a lifetime to dream into being. Now Russell returns with her second collection of short stories, Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Knopf), and this time she stretches that golden imagination beyond the humid lagoons of her native state. To read the first chapter of Swamplandia! is to fall immediately into a universe so rich and strange, so haunted by humans, that it feels like a classic of American legend. Something rare happened: the Pulitzer Prize nomination that she garnered was never once questioned, even for a first-time novelist. Her 2011 novel, Swamplandia!, turned readers into instant fans with her treatment of a family battling to save their gator-wrestling theme park from extinction in the gnarled swamps of Florida. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, took stunning risks in an industry that seems more and more sheltered by the conventions of tidy realism. Her first collection of short stories, St. Give her a setting and she’ll grow beautiful monsters in its brilliantly described ecosystem. Still, it’s difficult to think of another writer working today who has Russell’s talent for gorgeous, risky prose and a seemingly endless arsenal of odd, inventive narratives. So, in the long hallways of literature, Karen Russell’s accomplishments do have a precedent. Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein at 19 and published the novel at 21. Karen Russell is not the first young writer to merge humanism and monstrosities in her fiction or take imaginative leaps buoyed by such fine writing that the reader follows along with the allegiance of wonder.

ABOVE: KAREN RUSSELL, SHOT AT SUN STUDIOS BY CHRISTOPHER GABELLO

Vampires in the lemon grove characters