MixedThe Los Angeles TimesThere are two kinds of pieces in Vampires in the Lemon Grove. The first and better setting for her is a more realistic one: when her fictional world looks pretty much like the one we live in but something uncanny is creeping out the place. That's how the title story works … Russell's less successful mode is straight fantasy, in which the story lives and dies on the potential of its conceit: a company of Japanese slave girls in the Meiji era turned into silkworms in ‘Reeling for the Empire,’ or ‘The Barn at the End of Our Term,’ about a farm full of horses that are also the reincarnations of former presidents … The centerpiece tales in Vampires make a strong case for Russell as a writer at the forefront of young American fiction and evoke the strangeness and disconnection of life in the states.
