Suspension of belief comes easily to children. So much of early life takes place within that sliver of existence between dreaming and waking. They instinctively know bogeymen exist where the night-light refuses to shine. And if there are bogeymen and other monsters, then a hero must exist to balance the equation.
Adults, however, lose the luxury of such trust in the universe. There is no room for the unknown. Each twilight mystery is spotlighted with a sanitizing intensity. Productivity goals and career paths replace trolls with riddles and royal quests. And the hero never gets recognition for handling a full-time job, the carpool, and serving healthy meals on time.
Editor Kate Bernheimer’s 2010 collection My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales, brings some of that magic back to adulthood. From Joy Williams’ look at the work of John James Audubon through the eyes of Baba Yaga to Rabih Alameddine’s ovulatory take on Sleeping Beauty, these modern stories bring the reader into a subverted reality, heroes, and horrors.
Like the bedtime stories of childhood, these new fairy tales transform the reader’s world into something a little like allegory and a little like a fun house mirror. These tales are moths: owned by the dark realms of imagination even as they yearn for the pyrogenic light of reality. They flutter in the shadows where the conscious mind cannot see clearly.
But they don’t stay there. They cannot. As fairy tales are governed by strict rules of justice and engagement, so is adulthood. Following each story, the authors offer explanations of varying lengths about why this story or why that take on it. It’s an informative addition, but comes off shamefacedly academic. It hints at a loss of youthful abandon for both the reader and writer. And therein lies the proof of how much this collection is needed. If even writers cannot play at fairy tales without rationalizing their actions, who can?
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