My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales, edited by Kate Bernheimer and Carmen Giménez Smith, is a 2010 World Fantasy Award-winning book we chose for the KLBAC Speculative Fiction Book Club's April 2024 discussion. I don't have much time to write about it, but I wanted to write up some notes ahead of our discussion. The main feeling, overall, is "Dang, 40 stories on the same theme is way too many." It quickly starts to feel like a chore to get through than a joy to read. And like most collections, particularly themed, multi-author collections, the quality varies pretty widely.

There's also the general tone of the collection, which feels like: "People think fairytales are all sweetness and light (do we really?), but they're really dark and nasty and transgressive and abject with pathos, so we're going to beat you over the head with that for 40 stories. Buckle in for your punishment!" This collection feels like it has a chip on its shoulder, something to prove, and goes too far in correcting what it perceives as a mistaken impression about fairytales, turning them into things nobody wants to read or hear. I can get into grim dark dark daaarrrrrrkness, but for 40 stories?

With limited time to read, I skipped the intros. I didn't start skipping stories until I was most of the way through, and got over the feeling of duty to read every story. 

• "Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child" by Joy Williams: I enjoyed this. I have always liked Baba Yaga stories, and this is a rare one in which she's not the villain (I suspect there are more like that which have not been translated into English). However, it really sets the grimdark theme that doesn't really let up much at all.
• "Ardour" by Jonathon Keats: While this is based on "The Snow Maiden," I couldn't help but think of "Yuki Onna," which is not a surprise as I wrote a horror story based on the story. This was pretty good, though, of course, sad.
• "I'm Here" by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya: This is one I remember really liking, with more of a quiet sorrow than the more visceral, distressing stories feature.
• "The Brother and the Bird" by Alissa Nutting: Based on "The Juniper Tree," this is where the collection gets its title, and it has the oft-repeated theme of this collection, that of parents who destroy their own children in various ways. This is where I started to feel like reading this would be a real slog. 
• "Hansel and Gretel" by Francine Prose: This story isn't terribly Hansel and Gretel-ish, but it's an interesting if weird one. Indeed, I'd just about put it more as a weird-fiction story than a fairytale, and this is where I realized that not every story in this book would be written in a fairytale style.
• "A Day in the Life of Half of Rumpelstiltskin" by Kevin Brockmeier: Very weird, and interesting, but almost brain-twisting. We are asked to identify not only with the extreme weirdo who is Rumpelstiltskin, but indeed only half of him, as he navigates life in our real work with only half a body (split lengthwise).
• "With Hair of Hand-Spun Gold" by Neil LaBute: This is one that has no fantastic elements, but is still inspired by Rumpelstiltskin, about a boy who was seduced by his teacher, and now stalks her. 
• "The Swan Brothers" by Shelley Jackson: The source, "The Six Swans," is already a pretty grim story, with a girl having to cut off her finger and such, and this is a melancholy jumble of several versions of the story, or maybe of different stories, combined with performance art.
• "The Warm Mouth" by Joyelle McSweeney: And this is where I started asking myself, "Can I just drop this? Can I just skip this month's discussion? This feels grotesque for the sake of being grotesque. I don't want to read this book anymore." But I kept going. I do wish I'd just skipped this, though. Though if I'd read it by itself, I might have enjoyed it more.
• "Snow White, Rose Red" by Lydia Millet: Creepy non-fantastic story.
• "The Erlking" by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum: I seem to remember liking this better than the last few, but I can hardly remember anything about it.
• "Dapplegrim" by Brian Evenson: This I remember as "oh boy, more grimdark."
• "The Wild Swans" by Michael Cunningham: Nice and short.
• "Halfway People" by Karen Joy Fowler: Another Wild Swans story, and not blessedly short. It's all right, but nothing much else comes to mind.
• "Green Air" by Rikki Ducornet: This is inspired by both "Bluebeard" and "The Little Match Girl," but I also thought of "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" while reading it. 
• "The Mermaid in the Tree" by Timothy Schaffert: This one stuck in my head more than most, but it was still pretty abject, though in the New Weird style similar to writers like Kathe Koja. Though it was still quite unpleasant, it's one that'll live in my head more than nearly all these stories.
• "What the Conch Shell Sings When the Body is Gone" by Katherine Vaz: Another "Little Mermaid" story, this time mostly non-fantastic and drawing on some real-life mermaid performance history, which made me like it. (I have written about mermaids...) Melancholy but not disgusting, it's a story of a woman unable to find her voice as her husband cheats on her.
• "The Snow Queen" by Karen Brennan: Strange, and about my biggest fear: dementia. At least that's what little I remember of the story.
• "Eyes of Dogs" by Lucy Corin: I don't remember much of the source story, "The Tinder Box," but this does involve one of my favorite legendary tropes: dogs with huge eyes that stare at you. 
• "Little Pot" by Ilya Kaminsky: Not very memorable.
• "A Bucket of Warm Spit" by Michael Martone: Based on "Jack and the Beanstalk," this is where I decided I can skip stories without guilt. Not that I did for a couple more stories--after all, the next one is by Kelly Link, who I'd never skip. This one, though, I'd have been happy to skip. Overwritten, repetitious, tiresome.
• "Catskin" by Kelly Link: Not my favorite story by her by a long stretch, but still one of the best stories in the book. In her notes, Link says she purposely tried to write something unlike her other stories, and yes, this one is more fairytale than her usual magical realism.
• "Teague O'Kane and the Corpse" by Chris Adrian: I would have skipped this one, probably, if it were not so short. It's really not much more than a modernization of the source story.
• "Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay" by Jim Shepard: The really interesting thing about this one is the events it's based on, the 1946 Aleutian Islands Quake (which caused tsunami all over the Pacific but particularly one at Hilo, Hawaii, that's described in the story) and the 1958 quake that created the world's tallest tsunami at Lituya Bay, Alaska.
• "Body-Without-Soul" by Kathryn Davis: Love, loss, sadness.
• "The Girl, the Wolf, the Crone" by Kellie Wells: skipped
• "My Brother Gary Made a Movie and This is What Happened" by Sabrina Orah Mark: skipped
• "The Color Master" by Aimee Bender: I quite liked this one, but damn I'm so sick of royalty and their stupid needs. I read it because the author was headlined on the book cover, and because it focuses on art and color.
• "The White Cat" by Marjorie Sandor: skipped.
• "Blue-Bearded Lover" by Joyce Carol Oates: Of course I'm not going to skip Oates. It's an interesting take on "Bluebeard," in that the woman submits herself and thereby manipulates him to survive and thrive with the psychopath.
• "Bluebeard in Ireland" by John Updike: I've read this one before. Updike seems like he's always going on about men vs women, and in this one the wife's feminism (which seems largely based on hating men) feels like Updike's take on feminism as some passing fad, but he's just as hard on the male main character as he is on the wife.
• "A Kiss to Wake the Sleeper" by Rabih Alameddine: Interesting "Sleeping Beauty" take, but just goes pretty over the top by the end.
• "A Case Study of Emergency Room Procedure and Risk Management by Hospital Staff Members in the Urban Facility" by Stacey Richter: Based on "Cinderella," it feels like the patient was somehow exerting a psychic fairytale reality on everyone else? Not really sure. 
• "Orange" by Neil Gaiman: Of course I didn't skip Gaiman, either. Interesting. Better than most. But confusing as it is only the answers to a questionnaire that we don't know the questions of. Might even reread this one.
• "Psyche's Dark Night" by Francesca Lia Block: skipped
• "The Story of the Mosquito" by Lily Hoang: Finally, some non-Western stories! And yet, still just OK.
• "First Day of Snow" by Naoko Awa: This felt like an actual Japanese fairytale, in the vein of Ogawa Mimei.
• "I Am Anjuhimeko" by Hiromi Ito: I tried to quit this one halfway through, but on skimming I saw that it has a Yamanba in it, and I figured I should go ahead and read it properly. This is kind of the epitome of what I got so tired of with this collection: dark, child trauma, and very stylized to the point where it's just not enjoyable to read. Some interesting connections to Japanese myth.
• "Coyote Takes Us Home" by Michael Mejia: And this is where I gave up reading. I know enough Spanish to get a few of the references and know that there are WAY more that I'm not getting. I love Coyote stories, though this one is more about the coyotes who take people across the border into the US. Interesting but a slog to get through. I decided I'd had enough of this book at this point.
• "Ever After" by Kim Addonizio: skipped
• "Whitework" by Kate Bernheimer: skipped