'Orange World' review: Karen Russell's book is the must-read story collection of the summer

Karen Russell's first collection of short stories, "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves," knocked my socks off in 2006. Her second, "Vampires in the Lemon Grove," raised the hairs on the back of my neck seven years later.

Her third story collection, "Orange World," makes me want to shout with joy. Russell's ease with her material, her sheer glee on the page, shines through in each piece. There are just eight stories here, but each one holds a tiny, complete vision: eight delicious wedges of an orange.

Whether her characters are young women attempting to escape a majestic Northwest ski lodge populated by ghosts, a boy who falls in love with a body preserved in a bog or a zombie doctor on the island of Corfu, their voices and personae demand readers' attention.

As I read through the new tales, I was also struck by how she pays homage to her fantasy and science-fiction predecessors. "Madame Bovary's Greyhound" could have been written by Peter S. Beagle. "The Tornado Auction" put me in mind of Arthur C. Clarke, "The Bad Graft" of Ray Bradbury and so forth. Russell's assurance now extends to honoring those who helped her master a genre.

The final, eponymous story veers more toward horror than the others. "Orange World" involves a young mother named Rae and the deal she strikes with the devil to keep her pregnancy. As in her 2011 novel, "Swamplandia!," Russell here combines the workings of a woman's body with dark, evil forces. Her foremother here has to be Mary Shelley, who understood that the gift of life arrives with strings attached.

So do the women in Rae's mothers' group, who greet one another less as people than as collections of their postnatal trauma. "My name is Halimah. I had a C-section, and I feel like a library where they misshelved all the books." As Rae nurses the devil to keep her infant son alive and safe from the perils of "Orange World," the realm of household terrors, she learns that she's been dealing not with the devil but a devil: "Rookie mistake, babe," one of the other mothers tells Rae. And with that sardonic twist, Russell reminds us we're in the hands of a master.