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A review by mattlefevers
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales by Kate Bernheimer
3.0
I saw this book at an indie bookstore in Santa Cruz and grabbed it immediately. It is exactly the kind of book I'd hope to buy from an indie bookstore in Santa Cruz.
The three-star rating I've given this is due to its greatest strength being its greatest weakness. It is very long. There are a ton of short stories in here (forty, in fact!) and the sheer volume allows certain tales to bring the class curve down. There is some avant-garde stuff in here, and that's coming from somebody who ranks "House of Leaves" in my top five favorite books. I read the short play "The Warm Mouth" twice and maybe still didn't understand it; "Body-without-Soul" started off so awesome that I quite literally became depressed when the story went nowhere; and some of the tales towards the end were such a bewildering experiment in word salad that it was less like reading a story and more like staring at those random letters that scroll by in The Matrix. I read this whole book cover to cover but if I were to loan it to a friend, I would feel the need to mark off certain entries in yellow caution tape to warn them away.
Now that I've made it sound terrible: way more of these are good than bad. And some are astonishing. Aimee Bender is one of my favorite short story writers (her name on the cover is probably what sealed the deal for me), and her story "The Color Master" was so beautiful I couldn't look away. "Teague O'Kane and the Corpse" by Chris Adrian was super fun and compelling, and I've never read Joy Williams before but her entry "Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child" is a magnificent and creative start to the book.
For a collection whose theme is "fairy tales", some of the best stories were the ones furthest removed from their roots. Jim Shepard's "Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay" is a quiet, deep story that I saw no traces of fairy tale in but loved all the same, and "A Case Study of Emergency Room Procedure..." (Stacey Richter) is a hilariously inventive take on dry, academic nonfiction.
The author whose story most made me want to check out some more of their work was Timothy Schaffert, whose longish tale "The Mermaid in the Tree" was simultaneously moving and chock-full of cleverness and detail. The quirky, dark world he paints, in which mermaids coexist with humans but as a sort of second-class citizen, almost feels wasted in such a short form. I loved it.
Overall, for anyone who loves that grim, mysterious vibe of classic, pre-Disney fairy tales -- rife with amputations and child endangerment, untrustworthy animals and black magic -- I would absolutely recommend this volume... though I could give you some suggestions regarding which ones to skip.
The three-star rating I've given this is due to its greatest strength being its greatest weakness. It is very long. There are a ton of short stories in here (forty, in fact!) and the sheer volume allows certain tales to bring the class curve down. There is some avant-garde stuff in here, and that's coming from somebody who ranks "House of Leaves" in my top five favorite books. I read the short play "The Warm Mouth" twice and maybe still didn't understand it; "Body-without-Soul" started off so awesome that I quite literally became depressed when the story went nowhere; and some of the tales towards the end were such a bewildering experiment in word salad that it was less like reading a story and more like staring at those random letters that scroll by in The Matrix. I read this whole book cover to cover but if I were to loan it to a friend, I would feel the need to mark off certain entries in yellow caution tape to warn them away.
Now that I've made it sound terrible: way more of these are good than bad. And some are astonishing. Aimee Bender is one of my favorite short story writers (her name on the cover is probably what sealed the deal for me), and her story "The Color Master" was so beautiful I couldn't look away. "Teague O'Kane and the Corpse" by Chris Adrian was super fun and compelling, and I've never read Joy Williams before but her entry "Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child" is a magnificent and creative start to the book.
For a collection whose theme is "fairy tales", some of the best stories were the ones furthest removed from their roots. Jim Shepard's "Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay" is a quiet, deep story that I saw no traces of fairy tale in but loved all the same, and "A Case Study of Emergency Room Procedure..." (Stacey Richter) is a hilariously inventive take on dry, academic nonfiction.
The author whose story most made me want to check out some more of their work was Timothy Schaffert, whose longish tale "The Mermaid in the Tree" was simultaneously moving and chock-full of cleverness and detail. The quirky, dark world he paints, in which mermaids coexist with humans but as a sort of second-class citizen, almost feels wasted in such a short form. I loved it.
Overall, for anyone who loves that grim, mysterious vibe of classic, pre-Disney fairy tales -- rife with amputations and child endangerment, untrustworthy animals and black magic -- I would absolutely recommend this volume... though I could give you some suggestions regarding which ones to skip.