A review by gettyhesse
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

4.0

Most of these stories are uncanny, unsettling, ambiguous, and anarchically amoral, just like the best old folk stories. As one reads one story after another, a feeling of dread slowly settles upon you. The story “Hygeine” was the first piece of writing in a year or more to make me literally gasp aloud in horror.

There are, however, two stories that I disliked, both toward the very end: the strangely slapstick and offensively fatphobic “Marilena’s Secret” and the darkly farcical and religiously moralistic “The Old Monk’s Testament.” Perhaps incidentally they both undercut the dread generated by the rest of the collection.