I read Karen Russell's wonderful, Swamplandia.
When I head we were reading Karens work, I immediately thought of this book because it had been recommended to me awhile ago and had been on my reading list for ages because I love florida, all it's wilderness and reptiles of course.

  For those who haven't read it it's basically about a swamp themed tourist trap with a family that wrestles alligators. The mother who is the main attraction of the park, dies so the park struggles. In the meantime, the oldest daughter has discovered that she can summon ghosts and runs off to marry one, so her little sister (also the narrator of the story) must take her secret albino alligator, and a gypsy birdman into the "underworld" to retrieve her sister before she kills herself.
So. Freaking. Interesting.
Russells voice, from the works of hers I have read, is a seamless merging of supernatural and natural. Just like vampires in the Lemon Grove, Swamplandia depicts a normal (but interesting on its own) situation, with some supernatural element thrown in and the characters respond to these supernatualities in the exact way I think real people would respond to such things.
Her voice is playful, yet with a darker undertone. Very dark things seem to happen very causally in both of the stories of hers that I have read. In "Vampires in the Lemon Grove" a girl is murdered when the vampire gives into temptation and drinks her blood. But this is hardly treated as a big part of the story, nor was anything leading up to that. In swamplandia, a young girl is raped and her sister tries to hang herself but these things do not take over the story. They just kind of happen.
Another thing I can tell Russell is very good at is metaphors.
She often times in swamplandia, compares things to alligators. she describes an old man as wrinkled and cold hearted, with an ugly gnarled face like an alligator, looking at you with glossy eyes. Not only does this type of description give us an immediate picture of the man in question, it also brings the theme and focus of the story back into place, even if the characters are no longer in the swamp.

It was really quite a good book. I would recommend it. Mostly because of Karen Russell's writing but also because alligators are so cool.