Zombies, Canadians, and other surreal things

I'm not sure precisely what to make of Kelly Link, but it's certainly entertaining to try to make something sensible of her. Here's a link to "The Hortlak" online, one of the surreal short stories in her Magic for Beginners book, now available for free download from the same page.

The zombies were like Canadians, in that they looked enough like real people at first, to fool you. But when you looked closer, you saw they were from some other place, where things were different: where even the same things, the things that went on everywhere, were just a little bit different.

...

Maybe his friend Dave had been telling the truth and there was a
country down there that you could visit, just like Canada. Maybe when the zombies got all the way to the bottom, they got into zippy zombie cars and drove off to their zombie jobs, or back home again, to their sexy zombie wives, or maybe they went off to the zombie bank to make their deposits of stones, leaves, linty, birdsnesty tangles, all the other debris real people didn’t know the value of.

Go visit, see if you might like her stuff. Enough people did to give her short stories three Nebulas, a Hugo, and a World Fantasy Award.