My Mother She Killed Keith, My Father He Ate Keith

Read from Wednesday, March 2nd to Saturday, March 5th.

My Mother she Killed Me, My Father he Ate Me, a collection of forty new fairy tales, edited by Kate Bernheimer.  I was intrigued by the title of this book, and it was one of the first I added to my new Amazon wish list.  Including authors such as Joyce Carol Oates, Aimee Bender, Neil Gaiman and John Updike, this book is a modern take on many classic fairy tales.  Each author takes a story and interprets it his or her own way.  Some of the stories are completely modern but with the same fairy tale lesson, and some of them are completely new stories in the same tone as the classics.  Some have magical elements, and some are just realistic.

It is grouped into stories by region, based on the original fairy tale it is based off of.  Starting in Russia, and then Germany with all the Grimm tales, and then Denmark with Hans Christian Anderson, France with Charles Perrault, Italy, England, Japan, Mexico and the United States with Snow White and Edgar Allen Poe.  What is most surprising about all these tales, and something that can be derived from the title, is that the stories are all very gruesome, violent, and unsettling.  The title comes from "The Brother and the Bird," which is a story about how the mother kills her son, and then uses his body in pies that she makes for the family.  The sister tries to bury her brother in the yard under the Juniper tree, and he eventually comes back in the end.  There are other really interesting stories, and my favorites are the ones with the more magical elements.  These are the ones in which the authors try to write new fairy tales, but ones that could fit in nicely in 18th century Europe.  They are simple, and tell the story of the protagonist and his adventures.

"The Warm Mouth" is pretty freaky.  It is about some roadkill, a dead girl and other discarded items that travel in a giant mouth and scare some criminal in a motel.  "Dapplegrim" is the story of a possessed horse that causes destruction and murder.  "The Mermaid in the Tree" takes place in a world where Mermaids live, and one comes on shore and a boy falls in love with her.  "Catskin" is really interesting, about a witch who is poisoned and leaves her revenge in the form of a cat, and there are all sorts of bodily transformations.  "Teague O'Kane and the Corpse" tells the story of a vain teenage boy who must carry a corpse to his grave before sun-up, and when he lies the corpse down, he sees that it is himself.  "I am Anjuhimeko," from Japan, is a story of a little girl that is buried in the sand for three years by her father, and then sent away from home.  She is tormented, and meets a witch, and it is all pretty crazy.

There are some good realistic stories as well.  "The Erlking" is about a mother and daughter at a medieval fair.  The mother is a normal helicopter parent, worrying over many things, and in the end a strange man beckons to the girl and takes her.  That was an unsettling story.  "Snow White, Rose Red" is about a man living in the woods who befriends two young girls and then almost kills their father when he beats his wife.  "Bluebeard in Ireland" is the story of an old man with his third, young wife on a vacation in Ireland.  She gets on his nerves and he contemplates leaving her.  "Ever After" is about seven dwarfs, or little people, that live and work together in a restaurant.  They have a copy of Snow White and they elevate the prospect of her return and saving them to a cult religion. 

Some of the stories are too long, and are more just modern day short stories, which can be boring.  The interesting, gruesome and mysterious stories were the ones that I really enjoyed.  On the whole, the book was pretty good, although I found myself rushing through one in order to get to the next.  I read it all over just a couple of days while on vacation in Chicago, my first trip to the city. It was a unique experience, and a fun read.  Three and a half out of four stars.