Out There

Kate Folk's debut collection opens with its title story, in which a swarm of fake men called blots is loosed on San Francisco's dating apps to swindle vulnerable women out of their personal information. The companion piece, Big Sur, looks at the blots' own experiences. The title story and Big Sur bookend the collection.

The stories in between are just as strange. In A Scale Model of Gull Point, a sculptor trapped in a skyscraper restaurant watches a violent coup tear through the city below and builds a precise replica of the town as it is destroyed. The Bone Ward is set on a ward treating a mysterious condition that melts bone, where a dangerous love triangle forms. In The House's Beating Heart, a house containing giant human organs feeds on the exhausted graduate students who rent its rooms. In The Void Wife, a curtain of nothingness steadily wipes out the world, and one woman must decide who she wants to spend eternity with.

Folk blends science fiction, horror and psychological realism, and her stories carry implicit political and feminist concerns. The collection is a darkly comic look at life in the digital age, and its settings feel thoroughly current. Folk pairs the small, disposable details of online life with a generous dose of absurdity. Many more stories follow these.

Out There and Big Sur have been adapted by Hulu into a TV series. Kate Folk serves as executive producer and co-writes it with Sharon Horgan, the writer behind Catastrophe.