Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

“All the better to see you with, Rotk?ppchen. ”


Right. Fuck you, wolf. Fuck you and your goddamn road of stones and needles. Nix runs reset on all of Oma’s optic servos and outboards.

She’s rewarded with the dull thud and subsequent discordant chime of a reboot.

“What big teeth I have,” Nix says, and now she does turn towards the bzou, and as Oma wakes up, the virus begins to sketch out, fading in incremental bursts of distorts and static. “All the better to eat you with.”

“Have I found you now, old rascal?” the virus manages between bursts of white noise. “Long have I been looking for you.”


The bzou had been meant as a distress call from Oma, sent out in the last nanoseconds before the crash. “I’m sorry, Oma,” Nix says, turning back to the computer. “The forest, the terra . . . I should ? 178 ?

? Caitlín R. Kiernan ?

have figured it out sooner.” She leans forward and kisses the console.

And when she looks back at the spot where the bzou had been crouched, there’s no sign of it whatsoever, but there’s Maia, holding the storybook . . .

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The New York Times recently hailed Caitlín R. Kiernan “one of our essential writers of dark fiction.” Her novels include The Red Tree (nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards) and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (winner of the James Tiptree, Jr.

Award and the Bram Stoker Award, nominated for the Nebula, Locus, Shirley Jackson, and Mythopoeic awards). To date, her short fiction has been collected in thirteen volumes, most recently Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One), and The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories. Currently, she’s writing the graphic novel series Alabaster for Dark Horse Comics and working on her next novel, Red Delicious.

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“Lupine” grew from grafts to the fairy tale rootstock most of us received as children. Here’s one addition: the blue-petaled wildflower for which the heroine is named was once thought to deplete the soil, ravaging it like a wolf (there’s an etymological connection); a nitrogen-fixer, lupine actually enhances it. Here’s another addition: when in the company of a desperate crush we often act idiotically, in direct opposition to our own best interests.

Here’s a third: a character in Peter S. Beagle’s awe-worthy novel The Last Unicorn curses another by saying: “I’ll make you a bad poet with dreams!” This caused Nisi Shawl to think about what makes a curse truly terrible to its victims and to devise her own—strictly for literary uses.

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Lupine


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Nisi Shawl


Once there was a little girl whose mother hated her. The mother was not a bad woman, but she had not wanted a child, and so she put her daughter into a secret prison and pretended she did not exist. The father was deceived, for he and the woman parted long before he would have learned she was to have a child. Soon after they separated, the mother’s love for him languished and died. As for her daughter, the mother felt nothing toward her but the deepest loathing.

The little girl, on the contrary, loved her mother very much, because she was born to love, and in her prison she knew no one else. Lupine, as she was called, had not even a kitten or a cricket to love, not even a doll to play with. The wind from the mountains blew seeds into her lonely tower, and she nourished these into plants: flowers and downy herbs.

When her mother brought food and water, Lupine always lavished kisses on her; however, these only strengthened the woman’s hatred of her beautiful child. “She is young and has her whole life ahead of her. My life is passing by, faster and faster, and soon I will be dead,”

the mother thought. To fill Lupine’s years with misery was the object of her private studies, and one day she found an answer that would serve.

She gave it to Lupine as medicine, but it was really a potion containing an evil spell. Lupine suspected nothing, but complained ? 185 ?