My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me

Previously published in the Herald magazine. 

You would be hard pressed to find a person who has not grown up hearing some form of fairy or folk tale. Put aside language and culture, and everyone remembers childhood tales of the evil stepmother, of the wicked witch, of Baba Yaga, of a churail – stories that were meant to thrill and scare us as children, and in doing that, entertain us. Everyone knows that classic fairy tales are about murder, torture, pain and death – anyone who says that’s too negative a reading of fairy tales just hasn’t ever read the originals. Fairy tales, or folk tales come from deep within an entire culture’s subconscious and its attempts at dealing with realities it may or may not completely understand. It’s not a stretch of the imagination to say that they are not just for children or for children at all -  the best ones will leave even adults with wonder and fear.

It is keeping this in mind that the editor of The Fairy Tale Review, Kate Bernheimer, collected stories for a compilation called My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me. The collection is an impressive one, with forty stories from a variety of writers, some as popular as Neil Gaiman, John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates, others less well known commercially perhaps, but just as popular in smaller niches. Each story comes with a postscript from its writer, explaining the inspiration behind it – often one that stems from a favourite childhood story. But these aren’t simply modern retellings or re-imaginings of classic fairy tales: these are new stories, new ways of dealing with realities that have consistently challenged cultures over the years. And no, they’re not for children either.

Those expecting the standard fairy tale conceits and motifs to exit in this collection will not be disappointed. Suffering, loss of love and life, beauty, loneliness and betrayal all make an appearance here, with a sense of impending doom always just around the surreal, possibly shape-shifting corner. But most of these stories are set in a contemporary world, one that readers will be painfully familiar with. There is no suspension of disbelief needed to transport a reader into a magical world of fairies, gnomes and swan princes; instead they all seem to exist in the reader’s world, but not happily and not without consequences.

The stories in this collection are varied and most manage to hold their own amongst such a large roster of talent: a young mother takes her daughter to an exclusive school’s fair, where a strange and threatening man lurks amongst the dolls on show; a homeless man comes in out of the woods like the big bad wolf, but stops the father of two young girls from murdering their beautiful but emaciated and mentally challenged ballerina mother; and in an incredibly sinister take on The Grimms Brothers’ The Juniper Tree, a stepmother turns homicidal and really does kill and serve her stepson for dinner. In a brilliant absurdist look at Rumplestiltskin, the writer examines what the character’s life would have been, had he really split himself down the middle by stamping his foot in his fit of anger. How would he function, keep his dead end job, cook his meals, buy his groceries, with only half his body? Where is his other half trapper? And what was his crime, to have deserved such a penance, other than wanting what had been promised to him: a child to raise and love, and alleviate his loneliness? Half of Rumplestiltskin is a savage, strange look at insulated, lonely modern life. The stories present in this book aren’t stories that exist only in our imaginations– these are sadly, the sad and often violent realities we live in.

 My Mother She Killed Me… is an astute, fun read. Most of the stories are contemporary and ring true and their modern takes on the fairy tale grotesque and gothic will probably interest even those who do not believe in revisiting childhood stories. These tales often reveal the absurd in the world: they are whimsical, dark and delicious.