Short Stories & Anthologies
![Kate Folk - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_a_kate_folk.jpg)
Out There: Stories
A thrilling new voice in fiction injects the absurd into the everyday to present a startling vision of modern life, "[as] if Kafka and Camus and Bradbury were penning episodes of Black Mirror" (Chang-Rae Lee, author of My Year Abroad).
"Stories so sharp and ingenious you may cut yourself on them while reading."-Kelly Link, author of Get In Trouble
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Kirkus Reviews
With a focus on the weird and eerie forces that lurk beneath the surface of ordinary experience, Kate Folk's debut collection is perfectly pitched to the madness of our current moment. A medical ward for a mysterious bone-melting disorder is the setting of a perilous love triangle. A curtain of void obliterates the globe at a steady pace, forcing Earth's remaining inhabitants to decide with whom they want to spend eternity. A man fleeing personal scandal enters a codependent relationship with a house that requires a particularly demanding level of care. And in the title story, originally published in The New Yorker, a woman in San Francisco uses dating apps to find a partner despite the threat posed by "blots," preternaturally handsome artificial men dispatched by Russian hackers to steal data. Meanwhile, in a poignant companion piece, a woman and a blot forge a genuine, albeit doomed, connection.
Prescient and wildly imaginative, Out There depicts an uncanny landscape that holds a mirror to our subconscious fears and desires. Each story beats with its own fierce heart, and together they herald an exciting new arrival in the tradition of speculative literary fiction.
"Stories so sharp and ingenious you may cut yourself on them while reading."-Kelly Link, author of Get In Trouble
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Kirkus Reviews
With a focus on the weird and eerie forces that lurk beneath the surface of ordinary experience, Kate Folk's debut collection is perfectly pitched to the madness of our current moment. A medical ward for a mysterious bone-melting disorder is the setting of a perilous love triangle. A curtain of void obliterates the globe at a steady pace, forcing Earth's remaining inhabitants to decide with whom they want to spend eternity. A man fleeing personal scandal enters a codependent relationship with a house that requires a particularly demanding level of care. And in the title story, originally published in The New Yorker, a woman in San Francisco uses dating apps to find a partner despite the threat posed by "blots," preternaturally handsome artificial men dispatched by Russian hackers to steal data. Meanwhile, in a poignant companion piece, a woman and a blot forge a genuine, albeit doomed, connection.
Prescient and wildly imaginative, Out There depicts an uncanny landscape that holds a mirror to our subconscious fears and desires. Each story beats with its own fierce heart, and together they herald an exciting new arrival in the tradition of speculative literary fiction.
Editorial Reviews
"Out There is for readers who consider body horror to be a love language. True romantics will swoon either despite or because of the gore that accompanies these sharp, affable stories . . . Folk's stories have been compared to Shirley Jackson's, and this is most apparent in the way Folk balances her horror with humor."-The New York Times Book Review
"[The short story] Out There originally ran in the New Yorker and was something of a viral sensation. Fans of the story won't be disappointed by the collection, which also explores a gendered territory somewhere in the borderlands of magical realism, weird horror, sci-fi and literary fiction about jaded relationships."-Los Angeles Times
"Folk's ample imagination ably . . . offer[s] a perfect encapsulation of our modern madnesses, like an Alice's looking glass for our social media–obsessed age."-Chicago Review of Books
"[Folk] writes witty, cinematic fiction that merges familiar scenarios with uncanny menace [and] capably captures the lunacy of the moment we're living through."-San Francisco Chronicle
"There's something of the comedy of manners to these stories, as well as others in the collection. But there's also a bleaker undercurrent…. And Folk is more than willing to venture to the more unsettling corners that some of these stories' premises take her…. Folk covers a lot of stylistic ground in this collection…. [an] immersive, chilling debut."-Tor Online
"Kate Folk's short stories are wonderfully weird; playfully pushing the possibilities of plotlines towards the uncanny, creepy and off-kilter, they have a seam of dark humor that illuminates the grotesquery with an unnerving beauty."-The Daily Mail
"Out There . . . speaks to the current social media moment almost too well…. Folk often uses dread itself as her twist . . . never quite knowing when to expect the worst (or weirdest) the social technology of her near-future world has to offer."-Paste
"[The short story] Out There originally ran in the New Yorker and was something of a viral sensation. Fans of the story won't be disappointed by the collection, which also explores a gendered territory somewhere in the borderlands of magical realism, weird horror, sci-fi and literary fiction about jaded relationships."-Los Angeles Times
"Folk's ample imagination ably . . . offer[s] a perfect encapsulation of our modern madnesses, like an Alice's looking glass for our social media–obsessed age."-Chicago Review of Books
"[Folk] writes witty, cinematic fiction that merges familiar scenarios with uncanny menace [and] capably captures the lunacy of the moment we're living through."-San Francisco Chronicle
"There's something of the comedy of manners to these stories, as well as others in the collection. But there's also a bleaker undercurrent…. And Folk is more than willing to venture to the more unsettling corners that some of these stories' premises take her…. Folk covers a lot of stylistic ground in this collection…. [an] immersive, chilling debut."-Tor Online
"Kate Folk's short stories are wonderfully weird; playfully pushing the possibilities of plotlines towards the uncanny, creepy and off-kilter, they have a seam of dark humor that illuminates the grotesquery with an unnerving beauty."-The Daily Mail
"Out There . . . speaks to the current social media moment almost too well…. Folk often uses dread itself as her twist . . . never quite knowing when to expect the worst (or weirdest) the social technology of her near-future world has to offer."-Paste
Readers Top Reviews
She Treads Softly
Out There: Stories by Kate Folk is a highly recommended collection of fifteen short stories examining odd and disturbing peculiarities existing during common experiences found in alternate bizarre realities. These speculative fiction stories have a science fiction/alternate reality/magic realism quality to them. The ordinary experiences in the stories are understandable to our sensibilities, but they all have an absurdist twist toward the realities they really represent. For example dating app sites being infiltrated by blots, handsome biomorphic humanoids posing as real men, that Russian hackers use to steal data; a medical facility for a nighttime bone-melting disorder; a house that requires an exacting and time consuming level of care; a tourist finding a way to survive a sudden violent revolution; and a void that is slowing expanding and erasing Earth. All of the stories have been previously published and the writing is excellent. The stories can be humorous and horrifying at times. Folk's gives her characters development, and the plots in her short stories are compelling and vary widely. As with any short story collection, there are hits and misses. Out of the fifteen stories presented in the collection all were basically successful (with varying degrees of satisfaction) except for two stories which were absolute misses for me. Stories included are: Out There; The Last Woman on Earth; Heart Seeks Brain; The Void Wife; Shelter; The Head in the Floor; Tahoe; The Bone Ward; Doe Eyes; The House’s Beating Heart; A Scale Model of Gull Point; Dating a Somnambulist; Moist House; The Turkey Rumble; and Big Sur. Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Random House
ana sofia
Super weird short stories. Loved it! I personally would give it four stars but only because I never enjoy short stories as much as longer narratives. Since that’s a me problem and not the authors fault, I upped it to five.
Charles F. Getter
Aptly titled book. When you start reading any story in the collection, your mind entertains the question, “How far is the author (Kate Folk) willing to go with this?” And then she goes there, in fact, she goes beyond there! She channels Ursula Le Guin, with a soft focus on the morality of hypothetical situations and can be subversive like Amber Sparks, but with a more internalized, isolated vision for her characters, whom we encounter navigating a mix of Charlie Booker meets body horror nightmares. Most of her characters are selfish, but relatable; these bad people are good fun to read! There’s interdimensional sleep walking, a recasting of some Edgar Allen Poe, Ms. Folk has an over caffeinated imagination that serves this collection well. She’s willing to go there and it’s out there!
Matthew Denton-E
A wonderful collection of stories. Kate Folk is an adept writer— she builds crazy scenarios, and strange worlds, but manages to populate them with characters that feel real and sympathetic. The wide range of lengths and approaches to storytelling keep you entertained. You’ll suck down the brief tale of the head growing out of the floor, and the frenetic narrative of a vacation to Tahoe that goes awry. Then, you’ll want to linger on stories like “Shelter,” which provides an intimate window into a psychologically complex relationship between a young adult-entertainment copywriter and an aspiring rockstar. You’ll be riveted and surprised by the blots that populate the first and last stories. “The Bone Ward” is another ringer. I found this to be a hugely original and enjoyable book— I bet you will too.
Short Excerpt Teaser
Out There
I was putting myself out there. On my return to San Francisco from a gloomy Thanksgiving with my mother in Illinois, I downloaded Tinder, Bumble, and a few other dating apps I'd seen Instagram ads for. I was thirty, too young to accept a life void of excitement, romance, and perhaps, eventually, the lively antics of a child. I resolved to pass judgment on several hundred men per day, and to make an effort to message the few I matched with. I was picky enough that this seemed not wholly absurd. It would be like a new workout routine, a daily regimen to forestall a future of more permanent aloneness, and enjoy my relative youth in the meantime.
I'd never liked the idea of finding a romantic partner on an app, the same way you'd order pizza or an Uber. Such a method seemed to reduce love to another transaction. I had always felt it catered to lazy, unimaginative people. A worthy man would be out in the world doing things, not swiping on women's pictures in his dim apartment, like a coward. To further complicate matters, it was estimated that men on dating apps in the city were now 50 percent blots. But what choice did I have? Apps seemed to be the way everyone found each other these days. After my last breakup, I spent a while "letting something happen," which meant doing nothing. Years passed and nothing did happen, and I realized that without my intervention, my hand pushing against the warm back of fate, it was possible nothing ever would. In the end, it seemed to come down to never dating again, or taking the chance of being blotted. Though I supposed there had always been risks.
The early blots had been easy to identify. They were too handsome, for one thing. Their skin was smooth and glowing, and they were uniformly tall and lean. Jawlines you could cut bread with. They were the best-looking men in any room, and had no sense of humor.
I met one of these early blots several years ago. My friend Peter had invited me to a dinner party hosted by a tech founder he'd grown up with in the Sunset District, and with whom he'd once followed the band Phish around the country, selling nitrous and poppers to concertgoers. Peter and I didn't really hang out, beyond the meetings we attended in church basements for people who no longer drank. But I was bored, and it was a free dinner, and Peter made it sound like he'd already asked a bunch of other people who'd said no, which took some of the pressure off.
At dinner, I sat next to a guy named Roger. He had the telltale blot look-high forehead, lush hair, shapely eyebrows-but I didn't recognize him for what he was, because the blot phenomenon hadn't yet been exposed. Roger was solicitous, asking about my family, my work as a teacher, and my resentment toward the tech industry. When I declined the server's offer of wine, Roger's golden eyes flared with recognition, and he asked if I was in recovery. I said yes, for five years at that point, and he nodded gravely, saying he admired my commitment to this lifestyle; his dear aunt was also sober.
Roger seemed eager to charm, but I was not charmed. I felt spotlighted by his attentiveness, his anticipation of what I might want-another helping of fava bean salad, more water, an extra napkin when I dropped a chunk of braised pork on my skirt. I would say something self-deprecating, and he'd regard me steadily and assure me that I was a wonderful person, deserving of all I wanted from life, which wasn't what I'd been asking for. Roger didn't know me and wasn't a credible judge of my worth-unless his position was that all people had worth, which made him no judge at all. When I shifted the subject to him, he supplied a backstory that seemed pre-written.
"I came from ranchland in the northern United States," he told me. "My father was stern but loving, in his way. My mother is a wonderful woman who raised the four of us into strong, capable adults. My childhood was not without hardship, but these adversities shaped me into the person I am today. Now I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, land of innovation and possibility. I am grateful for the life I've been given, and I know it is thanks to the people who have loved and supported me on the journey."
I forced a chuckle of acknowledgment. "Wow," I said. "That's great."
As I drove Peter back to the Richmond District in my decrepit Corolla, he revealed that his friend, the event's host, had sprinkled the dinner party with blots.
"Blots?"
"It's an acronym for something," Peter said. "They're biomorphic humanoids. The latest advancement in the field of tactile illusion." He paused. "Fake people," he added.
I concealed my shock, not wanting to give Peter the satisfaction. "So you invited me to be ...
I was putting myself out there. On my return to San Francisco from a gloomy Thanksgiving with my mother in Illinois, I downloaded Tinder, Bumble, and a few other dating apps I'd seen Instagram ads for. I was thirty, too young to accept a life void of excitement, romance, and perhaps, eventually, the lively antics of a child. I resolved to pass judgment on several hundred men per day, and to make an effort to message the few I matched with. I was picky enough that this seemed not wholly absurd. It would be like a new workout routine, a daily regimen to forestall a future of more permanent aloneness, and enjoy my relative youth in the meantime.
I'd never liked the idea of finding a romantic partner on an app, the same way you'd order pizza or an Uber. Such a method seemed to reduce love to another transaction. I had always felt it catered to lazy, unimaginative people. A worthy man would be out in the world doing things, not swiping on women's pictures in his dim apartment, like a coward. To further complicate matters, it was estimated that men on dating apps in the city were now 50 percent blots. But what choice did I have? Apps seemed to be the way everyone found each other these days. After my last breakup, I spent a while "letting something happen," which meant doing nothing. Years passed and nothing did happen, and I realized that without my intervention, my hand pushing against the warm back of fate, it was possible nothing ever would. In the end, it seemed to come down to never dating again, or taking the chance of being blotted. Though I supposed there had always been risks.
The early blots had been easy to identify. They were too handsome, for one thing. Their skin was smooth and glowing, and they were uniformly tall and lean. Jawlines you could cut bread with. They were the best-looking men in any room, and had no sense of humor.
I met one of these early blots several years ago. My friend Peter had invited me to a dinner party hosted by a tech founder he'd grown up with in the Sunset District, and with whom he'd once followed the band Phish around the country, selling nitrous and poppers to concertgoers. Peter and I didn't really hang out, beyond the meetings we attended in church basements for people who no longer drank. But I was bored, and it was a free dinner, and Peter made it sound like he'd already asked a bunch of other people who'd said no, which took some of the pressure off.
At dinner, I sat next to a guy named Roger. He had the telltale blot look-high forehead, lush hair, shapely eyebrows-but I didn't recognize him for what he was, because the blot phenomenon hadn't yet been exposed. Roger was solicitous, asking about my family, my work as a teacher, and my resentment toward the tech industry. When I declined the server's offer of wine, Roger's golden eyes flared with recognition, and he asked if I was in recovery. I said yes, for five years at that point, and he nodded gravely, saying he admired my commitment to this lifestyle; his dear aunt was also sober.
Roger seemed eager to charm, but I was not charmed. I felt spotlighted by his attentiveness, his anticipation of what I might want-another helping of fava bean salad, more water, an extra napkin when I dropped a chunk of braised pork on my skirt. I would say something self-deprecating, and he'd regard me steadily and assure me that I was a wonderful person, deserving of all I wanted from life, which wasn't what I'd been asking for. Roger didn't know me and wasn't a credible judge of my worth-unless his position was that all people had worth, which made him no judge at all. When I shifted the subject to him, he supplied a backstory that seemed pre-written.
"I came from ranchland in the northern United States," he told me. "My father was stern but loving, in his way. My mother is a wonderful woman who raised the four of us into strong, capable adults. My childhood was not without hardship, but these adversities shaped me into the person I am today. Now I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, land of innovation and possibility. I am grateful for the life I've been given, and I know it is thanks to the people who have loved and supported me on the journey."
I forced a chuckle of acknowledgment. "Wow," I said. "That's great."
As I drove Peter back to the Richmond District in my decrepit Corolla, he revealed that his friend, the event's host, had sprinkled the dinner party with blots.
"Blots?"
"It's an acronym for something," Peter said. "They're biomorphic humanoids. The latest advancement in the field of tactile illusion." He paused. "Fake people," he added.
I concealed my shock, not wanting to give Peter the satisfaction. "So you invited me to be ...
