Step into author Kim Fu's 'dream version' of the PNW

August 01, 2025 / 9:00 am

caption: The KUOW Book Club is reading "Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century" by Kim Fu in July 2025.

This month, the KUOW Book Club read Kim Fu's surreal short story collection "Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century." Fu joined KUOW's Katie Campbell for a live conversation at the Seattle Central Library, the second in a three-part summer series in partnership with Seattle Public Library. The full audio from the event is available below.

he more I read Pacific Northwest authors' work, the more I see the influence of the region. No writer, it seems, is immune to the awe the region's forests, waters, and mountains inspire — both their beauty and their foreboding.

Kim Fu, who grew up in Vancouver, B.C. and moved to Seattle in 2012, is no different. But in her work, there is the true PNW and "the dream version."

"I'm in love with a dream version of this landscape, where I'm allowed to do whatever I want with it," Fu told a live audience when we spoke at the Seattle Central Library Wednesday night. "I won't name, like, a Seattle street, even if it would be obvious to someone else, someone who lived here, based on the other things I say about this street, just so I can have total creative freedom over it."

Listen to our full conversation by hitting the play button above, or watch the video here:

That freedom allows Fu to craft, for example, a harbor cruise wedding scene, featuring a laid back couple who compare the idea of getting married to deciding they want pizza for dinner:

"I don't care either way. And if one of us really wants to do something, and the other is indifferent, we should do it." He cut and speared another cross-section of his short stack. "Like if I really wanted pizza for dinner, and you were fine with anything, we would get pizza." LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY (BRIDEZILLA), PAGE 184

Let's be real: We all know that Seattle couple. And though it's not explicitly stated, as the couple's wedding cruise embarks, we all know what appears to be Elliott Bay or another bit of Puget Sound or the Pacific Ocean, where Fu's fantastical spin is growing:

Technically, [the sea monster] was an amalgamation of brainless multicellular organisms — chemically linked, lurching as one. Yes, it was easy to confuse the thick, bonded chains for tentacular limbs, the greater central mass for a body, to imagine its twitching-nerve reactions as movement coordinated by a central mind, but the science assured otherwise. Yes, videos of it surfacing and splashing down like a whale — a slimy, eyeless, mottled neon orange and yellow whale — were alarming, but as far as anyone could tell, it was a harmless cannibal, consuming only the type of microscopic sea life of which it was composed. LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY (BRIDEZILLA), PAGE 183

Spoiler alert: We learn later that this creature is, in fact, consuming more than microscopic sea life. Maybe even a panicked bride-to-be who's getting cold feet.

"I feel like the way we we live now creates a kind of emotional numbness," Fu said. "We see a lot of horrible things, and we see a lot of wonderful things, and we can no longer experience them fully often, because you kind of have to numb yourself to keep going at all.

"As a reader, I feel like I've noticed that when there is a fantastical element or a science fiction element or we're just set in a different universe, it breaks certain expectations and assumptions... and to even feel mundane feelings more profoundly again."

That's the unique magic of "Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century."

Whether Fu is drawing us into wedding anxiety or loss or lust, she's taking the theme a step further than you expect, even once you know a twist is coming.

Consider my personal favorite story in this collection, "Do You Remember Candy." All of humanity, all at once has lost the sense of taste. And it's not even just that your favorite snack is suddenly bland — a summer-ripe peach may taste of ash as the juices spread over your tongue. Fu focuses on a mother, Allie, and her young daughter, Jay.

Allie is devastated by the loss, ultimately making a business out of creating sensory experiences for customers who desperately want to experience food again.

When her client arrives, the classic French boule, she has him sit on the cold bathroom floor, surrounded by strangely colored candlelight and steam, the crackle of crust. She wraps him in a weighted blanket. She slips a baseball-size wad of cheap modeling clay into his hands, fresh from the packet, still hard. Wordlessly, she gestures for him to work the clay in his hands. She closes the door and leaves him alone. He emerges about twenty minutes later. His eyes are red and filmy. "Thank you," he says. She nods. He leaves hurriedly. LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY (DO YOU REMEMBER CANDY), PAGE 211

If you, like me, identify with Allie, this concept is devastating. It harkens back to the loss of taste many Covid-19 patients experienced, but more than that, it envisions a world robbed of one of our most colorful, varied senses.

But if you identify more with the teenage Jay, you might not be so bothered by what is just another in a long line of life changes.

“You don’t get it,” Allie says. “You’re too young.” Jay shrugs. She glides on the wood floor in her socks toward the door. She glances back at her mother over her narrow shoulders, her expression knowing, almost haughty, suggesting she’s privy to any number of things that Allie doesn’t understand. And Allie realizes Jay will never understand. The people demanding Allie’s services will be gone in a generation. She doesn’t create sensations, she awakens the memory of them, and only in those who are primed for it, who want badly to return to those memories, who want to believe. There are internet rumors about unaffected, isolated communities in the Amazon, but Allie knows these will turn out apocryphal in the end. The sensuous, life-affirming pleasure upon which whole cultures were built, which caused empires to rise and fall, will die with Allie and her peers. Allie walks to the window where Jay had been sitting. Jay has gone outside without a jacket or a hat. A thin, hard layer of snow covers their front lawn. Her headphones in, Jay is dancing, tossing her head, pirouetting on a booted foot. The snow sparkles around her, the winter sun low and blinding. Jay wraps her arms around her middle, still swaying, the picture of joy. LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY (DO YOU REMEMBER CANDY), PAGE 214

"That was when I believed in the book," Fu said of writing that passage. "Like, up to that point, I was having to sort of tell myself a lot of the little lies you tell yourself, to keep going through a writing project. I was like, 'I'm just writing short stories. We'll see what happens.' Like, no one said I was writing a book. But there was something about that image that felt to me like the ending of a book that I believed in, the image to which everything, all the other stories, point toward."

Taken as a whole, as a collection, "Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century" points toward not only "this tremendous grief for everything [we've] lost" but also the next generation's "hope and a new way of navigating and adapting."

There's something true to Fu's form in that.

In this collection, grief becomes almost mundane, or at least normal, a shared reality. And hope, youth, change become bizarre, even marvelous.

Listen to our full conversation by hitting the play button at the top of this post, or watch the video embedded above.

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Spoiler alert: This interview with Kim Fu was the second in a series of live KUOW Book Club events in partnership with Seattle Public Library.

We'll continue in August with Lynda V. Mapes' new book, "The Trees Are Speaking: Dispatches from the Salmon Forests." It just came out in April and is already being hailed as essential reading for anyone interested in environmental stewardship. In a nutshell, the book considers how old-growth forests play an irreplaceable role in the environment, but much like the forests themselves, it's so much more than that.

Look out for the reading schedule on Aug. 4. And don't miss our live conversation on Aug. 27.

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Katie Campbell
Online Editor/Reporter

Katie joined KUOW's online team as an editor and reporter in 2024, after serving three years as senior producer of the local Morning Edition program. She has covered a variety of local topics, including the Seattle City Council, elections, and breaking news. She also brings readers some levity with a weekly news quiz.
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