Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell

The Recruitment Agent travels the countryside to recruit female workers willing to travel far from their home prefectures to a new European-style silk-reeling mill. Back in Gifu I had tangly hair like a donkey’s tail, a mouth like a small red bean, but I tell the others that I was very beautiful. Nishi fibs that she once stowed away in the imperial caboose from Shimbashi Station to Yokohama, and saw Emperor Meiji eating pink cake. Dai claims that she knelt alongside her samurai father at the Battle of Shiroyama.

Some of our lies are quite bold: Yuna says that her great-uncle has a scrap of sailcloth from the Black Ships. One of the consequences of our captivity here in Nowhere Mill, and of the darkness that pools on the factory floor, and of the polar fur that covers our faces, blanking us all into sisters, is that anybody can be anyone she likes in the past. And the more our kaiko-bodies begin to resemble one another, the more frantically each factory girl works to reinvent her past. We come here tall and thin, noblewomen from Yamaguchi, graceful as calligraphy short and poor, Hida girls with bloody feet, crow-voiced and vulgar entrusted to the Model Mill by our teary mothers rented out by our destitute uncles - but within a day or two the drink the Recruitment Agent gave us begins to take effect. It’s a relief, in its way, the new anonymity. Several of us claim to have been the daughters of samurai, but of course there is no way for anyone to verify that now. And in the collection’s marvelous title story - an unforgettable parable of addiction and appetite, mortal terror and mortal love - two vampires in a sun-drenched lemon grove try helplessly to slake their thirst for blood. In a family’s disastrous quest for land in the American West, the monster is the human hunger for acquisition, and the victim is all we hold dear. When a group of boys stumble upon a mutilated scarecrow bearing an uncanny resemblance to the missing classmate they used to torment, an ordinary tale of high school bullying becomes a sinister fantasy of guilt and atonement.

A massage therapist discovers she has the power to heal by manipulating the tattoos on a war veteran’s lower torso. A community of girls held captive in a silk factory slowly transmute into human silkworms, spinning delicate threads from their own bellies, and escape by seizing the means of production for their own revolutionary ends.

A dejected teenager discovers that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left behind in a seagull’s nest.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell