RaveZYZZYVAFu stated she wanted in her work to take \'speculative ideas very seriously and at face value…without a winking eye to metaphor.\' Remarkably, she succeeds, avoiding the pitfalls of artfully occluded moralizing while saturating her stories with much-discussed contemporary woes ranging from insomnia to paralyzingly cynical social mores. The opening story, \'Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867,\' tugs the reader into a bleakly imaginary but believable world, setting the tone for the whole volume ... At times the stories of Lesser Known Monsters seem more akin to poetry. Tautly controlled language, often to the point of spareness, communicates the lyrical imagination that is the foundation for each piece. Fu tends toward diligently precise descriptions ... this linguistic tension encapsulates what Fu is playing with: merging the surreal and the concrete, the impossible and the way-too-real. Fu’s mastery of clever, strange concepts is undeniable throughout, but it is in the final two stories that her work achieves transcendence.
