“Sister Maria gave her a brave smile.

“ ‘And what is your name?’ she asked.

“The oldest sister howled something awful and inarticulate, a distillate of hurt and panic, half-forgotten hunts and eclipsed moons. Sister Maria nodded and scribbled on a yellow legal pad. She slapped on a name tag: hello my name is ________! ‘Jeanette it is.’ ”

The little wolves (werewolves, actually; this is explained quite reasonably) are being rehabilitated into proper young ladies in organdy dresses who are urged to practice compassion for all God’s creatures by feeding bread to ducks. Only one of the pack is found stubbornly unadaptable and is discovered trying to strangle a mallard with her rosary beads. This is not exactly the fantastic made realistic or the realistic fantastic. It’s a story sure of itself in the frolic of its strangeness. Fiction is by definition unreal, and Russell takes this coldly awesome truth and enjoys fully the rebel freedom it confers.

The more uncanny the situation, the more sensibly it is described. This is from the aforementioned “Reeling for the Empire” in “Vampires in the Lemon Grove”:

“I’ll put it bluntly: we are all becoming reelers. Some kind of hybrid creature, part kaiko, silkworm caterpillar, and part human female. Some of the older workers’ faces are already quite covered with a coarse white fur, but my face and thighs stayed smooth for 20 days. In fact I’ve only just begun to grow the white hair on my belly. During my first nights and days in the silk-reeling factory I was always shaking. I have never been a hysterical person, and so at first I misread these tremors as mere mood; I was in the clutches of a giddy sort of terror, I thought. Then the roiling feeling became solid. It was the thread: a color purling invisibly in my belly. Silk. Yards and yards of thin color would soon be extracted from me by the Machine.”

But Russell is no coy or mannered mistress of the freaky. Much of the pleasure in reading her comes from the wily freshness of her language and the breezy nastiness of her observations. A bum has a long stirrup-shaped face and sprawls across his bench on a bed of newspapers like Cleopatra. The door knocker in an evil-looking yellow house is a filth-encrusted brass pineapple. Bats in a cave are “a chandelier of furry bodies, heartbeats wrapped in wings the color of rose petals or corn silk.” A recently refurbished playground looks “like a madhouse. Padded swings, padded slides, padded gyms, padded seesaws and go-wheelies: all the once-fun equipment had gotten upholstered by the city in this red loony-bin foam.”