Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

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Richard Bowes lives in Manhattan. He has won two World Fantasy Awards, a Lambda, an International Horror Guild Award, and a Million Writers Award. Even aside from The Queen, The Cambion and Seven Others, 2013 is a busy year. Lethe Press has just republished his ? 145 ?

? Tales That Fairies Tell ?

1999 Lambda-winning novel Minions of the Moon (now available for the first time electronically). Lethe has also published his novel-in-stories, Dust Devil on a Quiet Street: tales told by an aging spec fiction writer and set in contemporary Greenwich Village. In September, Fairwood Press will publish his If Angels Fight, a collection of recent stories and previously uncollected award nominees and winners.

Recent and forthcoming appearances include: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Icarus, Lightspeed, Podcastle, and The Revelator; and the anthologies, After, Wilde Stories 2013, Ghosts: Recent Hauntings, Handsome Devil, Hauntings, Where Thy Dark Eye Glances, Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations, Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds, Daughters of Russ 2013, The Book of Apex, and The Time Traveler’s Almanac.

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The way I understand it, fairy tales play two important roles: first, they are meant to provide us with templates of behaviors, and second, to illustrate the values of the society that produced them.

When faced with a task of revamping a story to suit modern times, both templates and values had to be drastically adjusted: after all, curses are very different now, and the idea of a magical kiss seems downright reactionary. And the story of pediatric AIDS outbreak in Elista has haunted me ever since it happened—besides the heartbreak, there is nothing else I can think of that showed me that times had changed tragically, dramatically, and irrevocably. So this story is an attempt—however feeble—to extract some comfort from the terror.

(I guess there’s one more thing that fairy tales can do!) Ekaterina Sedia

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Sleeping Beauty of Elista


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Ekaterina Sedia


And this is how it begins: with a prick of a needle—a sharp point, and the children are too small to understand—infants, they just howl and squirm despite the reassuring hush hush shhhh be quiet of the nurse. So small that crying is just about the only thing they know how to do well. And for these children, soon enough it is the only thing—they do not sleep or eat, they only cry and fade away, they get sick and they cough, and strange white flowers bloom in their mouths and soon enough one by one by one they die. Except . . . but we will talk about her later.

It’s all in a prick of the sharp point, you see; this is how curses work. Of course there is a castle there.

No, a temple. It is new, actually. Because after a curse is enacted, it will spread outward—from an injection site (vaccinations are important) and through the blood vessels and capillaries, to the translucent skin that is already covered in febrile blooms, to the very quiet ward (that just a few weeks ago was filled with weak crying), to the families standing around dressed all in black, so quiet, to the borders of the republic and all the way to the capital, to the pages of the newspaper called Komsomolskaya Pravda. And as people there— so far—shake their heads and whisper about the horrors of the new disease, as the newspaper is congratulating itself for its newfound freedom and bravery—because until very recently no one ever said the word “AIDS” in print, it was all some mysterious virus X—as ? 151 ?

? Sleeping Beauty of Elista ?

UNESCO and WHO get involved and outraged, the curse continues