There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales

by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Book Overview

New York Times Bestseller
Winner of the World Fantasy Award
One of New York magazine's 10 Best Books of the Year
One of NPR's 5 Best Works of Foreign Fiction

The celebrated scary fairy tales of Russia's preeminent contemporary fiction writer--the author of the prizewinning memoir about growing up in Stalinist Russia, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel

Vanishings and aparitions,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0143114662
• ISBN13: 9780143114666
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 7.7"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Weird and Wonderful

I'm a sucker for fairy tales, folk tales, the weird and wonderful. This book is all that and more. The stories are written in an almost oral storytelling voice, but crafted in a way that displays just how much they truly are "written". Great danger exists in these stories. Terrible and surprising things happen to people, and miracles on occasion save them. Despite the aura of horror and magic, though, these stories tell so much about the social and political realities of Russian culture. I'll be rereading this one for sure.

Wonderful Book

A slender book of slender stories and quite wonderful. Probably enjoyable for anyone from adolescence through old age. My only complaint is that it doesn't come in hardback.

"Orchards of Unsual Possibilities"

Twisted, ghostly, and apocalyptic describe these tales, with characters that are on the brink of madness or despair. Most start out like simple, but slightly off folk tales - "There once lived a woman whose son hanged himself," "There once lived a girl who was killed, then brought back to life," "There once lived a girl who found herself in an unknown place, on a cold winter night." Then suddenly the stories take us out of ordinary existence and into strange, nightmarish worlds, described by the author as "orchards of unusual possibilities." Some recognizable tropes appear, but the landscape is completely unfamiliar and disconcerting. Instead of a child lost in the woods, we have a father with no children, a husband with no wife. He has no memory of who his family is and yet he keeps searching for them. "There once lived a father who couldn't find his children. He went everywhere, asked everyone--had his little children come running in here? But whenever people responded with the simplest of questions--'What do they look like?' 'What are their names?' 'Are they boys or girls?'--he didn't know how to answer. He simply knew that his children were somewhere, and he kept looking." What starts out seemingly as a ghost story, There's Someone in the House, becomes something quite different. Who or what is the woman in the house battling against? A ghost, her daughter or herself? "...Someone is secretly, soundlessly creeping from room to room. That's how it seems. The woman doesn't tell anyone about her poltergeist: It's still hiding, not knocking, not causing mischief, not setting anything on fire. The refrigerator isn't hooping around the apartment; the poltergeist isn't chasing her into a corner. Really there is nothing to complain about. But something has definitely moved in, some kind of living emptiness, small of stature but energetic and pushy, sneaking and slithering along the floor..." A mother frets over her Thumbelina-sized cabbage patch child Profound illumination comes to a woman lost in the woods with nothing but matches to light her way. A family quarantines itself when a disfiguring infectious disease ravages their town In these realms of the unusual, nothing is ever straightforward or neatly wrapped up; like disturbing dreams from which one awakens, they are not easily explained or forgotten. [...]

A wonderfully "odd" perspective

I read a review of this book in the local paper but I have to admit, it was the title that lead me to buy it. The book is full of short stories that take you down a path and at the end you say "whoa, didn't see that coming." This author is someone I will definitely buy more of - she definitely has an off kilter view of the world.

scary fairy tales indeed.

I'd heard good things about this book, so when I saw it at the bookstore the other day, I picked it up, and didn't put it down until I finished it that evening. The stories read more like fairy tales than traditional ghost stories. They all have an otherworldly quality, but sometimes the supernatural element does not appear until the end, and often she leaves questions unanswered. The worlds Petrushevskaya describes are bleak, spooky, and thoroughly believable. Unlike many short story collections, these stories never felt uneven. Each story is as good, if not better, than the one preceding it, and I imagine I will get even more out of the book when I read it a second time. I'd definitely recommend this book to fans of Angela Carter of Kelly Link, or a horror buff looking to read something a little more "literary".