Well written, well plotted, haunting, suspenseful and most of all brilliant.

Oh my...This is amazing - utterly weird and yet logical. I couldn't stop reading it and I bet I'll dream of rabbits tonight, brrr...

I finished this short story a few days ago, but I wanted to take some time to work out how I felt about it. Because this story was...odd, no doubt about it. Maybe 10 years ago I would have pretended to understand it, waxed lyrical about its hidden meanings and reflections on life, but 2019 me is unpretentious enough to admit that she has no effing idea what it meant. "A ghost story without any ghosts, domestic realism in which the domestic is unreal." is how the foreword described it.Here's what...

A story that has stayed with me for a long time. It didn't help that the day I after I read it, there were 4 rabbits on my lawn.

Kelly Link is a writer I kept hearing about for her brilliant genre-hopping, though she’s someone I had never actually read. Hooray for serendipitous wandering through the Web, because it led me to this post on Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading that finally brought me around to Link again.Link’s “Stone Animals” is a brilliant short story that starts off in a very normal, contemporary fiction kind of way, filled with psychological realism. It then free falls, veering sinisterly into the d...

Really? I don't get all of the good reviews here. I see what Link was trying to do, but I found her writing to be choppy and abrupt, and to get the full effect of the creepiness and the family's descent, the story really needed to be longer. I feel like so much happened, but it was only touched upon and it was very unsatisfying.And the end was perhaps one of the stupidest endings I have ever read, but I also find that this is a trend with contemporary short stories. It's like the authors are hav...

**read for my short essay class**All I have to say is wtf. Truly beautiful, I actually don’t really understand what happened tbh.

I think I was having a fever dream while reading this.

Deeply unsettling.

3.5 I don't really understand anything that happened here (which seems to be the point) but I did enjoy this. Left me feeling very unsettled and like I just woke up from a very strange dream.

I loved it. The story is brilliant, heartfelt, and darkly funny, gorgeously imagined and written. And talk about an unforgettable ending!

Read it because my son was assigned it in AP Lit. Very interesting, gothic-type haunted tale, with echoes of The Yellow Wallpaper and other classic tales interwoven into something unique. Something as straightforward as rabbits become the antagonists of a family who are looking to take some sort of control over their lives. Atmospheric and very interesting.

I finished Kelly Link's Stone Animals short story that is included in Magic for Beginners and I want to read everything she has written. Love this.

Here's what happened as I read this incredible story: This story, that is really only about 40 pages long, took me so long to read it because I simply couldn't hold it, BE with it, for too long. Much like the haunted toothbrush or alarm clock -- the chills would come and I'd have to tuck it away for a bit. But it was a mental chilling. Images and thoughts in this story would stay with me and demand their attention. I'd read some pages -- sometimes only a paragraph! (like Catherine's dreams of pe...

So, I wasn’t entirely into the ending of this piece, but the rest of it I adored in a sickly fascinated way. It’s just so wonderfully weird. Full of strangeness and descending into madness. I enjoyed the story much more than I expected to, given the slow beginning. My favorite moments of the story was the continued descent into madness that happened every time a new thing became haunted. Especially when their son became haunted later in the story, it was just so creepily satisfying, narratively....

Subjective: I believe a short story should be designed to guide a reader through an emotion, idea, taboo, or perhaps a principle. This story offers an unsettling, somewhat believable narrative. The writing is concise and the prose is strong but Link gets carried away with unsettling the reader, and sacrifices narrative responsibility for the sake of oddity. This tip of the scales creates a dissonance between the reader and the story and the reader looses the breadcrumb trail of appreciation and

A disappointing read with a boring ending. The writing was disconnected and the perspective character changed constantly, sometimes only a few paragraphs between each point of view. The author had this way of writing like William Gibson where they would use sentences without verbs. Personally I find that irritating, not poetic. All the characters are unlikable so it's hard to care what they do. There were some technical issues too like improper punctuation, double words, and missing capitalizati...

It took me several days to decipher how I felt about this story, and what exactly it meant. And can I tell you? It packs a fucking wallop. Link has turned the concept of “horror” and our idea of what it means to be haunted, and has stretched that concept and morphed it into something so sneakily subtle yet terrifying. This is not a ghost story. This is about the vicious cycle of everyday hauntings, and how inner psychosis reflects on the world around you. If you have skeletons in your closet, yo...

Stone Animals is a creepy AF, modern gothic short story from Link's collection Magic for Beginners, which has been published separately as a novella. ⁠⁠A family of four (a workaholic husband, pregnant wife, petulant daughter and timid son) move to the suburbs to the city, but find that rabbits keep encircling their house and that gradually their possessions start becoming 'haunted' in that they just feel 'wrong' somehow. ⁠⁠Whilst I can appreciate that some people might not like the choppy, disco...

Forgive me, but a good short story or book has to have a point. What exactly was I supposed to learn from Stone Animals? A family moves into a new house and all their old possessions seem to become haunted. The wife can't stop painting, the little girl can't stop sleepwalking, the little boy is afraid of everything, and the husband is never home. Then we add some magical realism with riders of bunnies attacking and other bizarre events and end up with a mess. I disliked this story intensely - a