Burning Girls and Other Stories

  ‘'I will surround that town with death. I will wrap death around their hearts, and I will rip them apart. I will kill them all. Every one.''
Go, girl! Leave not a sperm alive, that's how you deal with terrorists. Don't like the truth? I don't give a fuck, stay away from my page.
Don't let the pompous tags written by idiots on the back cover dissuade you from reading this gem. These tags are a hideous lip service to the minority who cries like a mob in a frenzy, the ones who support terrorists and the ones who believe that the words ‘'mother'' and ‘'father'' should be abolished from the vocabulary of every language in the world. I am not Jewish, I am not a feminist, I am not queer and I sure as Hell am NOT a leftist. Yet, this collection is one of the most difficult, demanding and memorable I've ever read. Forget about the aforementioned tags that would influence the narrow-minders, we are readers, honour our vocation.

‘'They made my father dance in thorns before they kill him.I used to think that this was a metaphor, that they beat him with thorny vines, perhaps. But I was wrong about that. They made him dance.''
Among the Thorns: A story set in Germany becomes a metaphor for anti-semitism, the Nazi terror and the unyielding bravery of the Jewish people, along with the fire of revenge of a daughter whose unbreakable bond with her dear father was violently shuttered.
‘'It hurts to come back from the dead. And it hurts to bring someone back from the dead.''
How to Bring Someone Back from the Dead: A haunting ode to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and the despair of losing the one you love.
Alice: A Fantasia: A diving into the creation of the character of Alice by Lewis Carroll.
‘'They've got to hear us, Lucy. All the way to Mayfair and Parliament. Maybe all the way back to Ireland. That'd make old Parnell proud, wouldn't it?''
Phosphorus: Based on Hans Christian Andersen's Little March Girl, this a brilliant retelling of the deep wound left on the lives of the Irish people following the Great Famine and the appalling conditions in the factories of London. It reads like a nightmarish Dickens and it's brilliant!
Ballroom Blitz: Based on The Twelve Dancing Princesses -one of my favourite fairy tales- this is a modern retelling in which twelve boys and twelve girls carry on dancing in a bar that is both suffocating and enticing. The boys find themselves in a pretty bad shape but each morning they become healed in a tale that is tragic, slightly gory and ingeniously beautiful. No spoilers but Jake and Isobel are Perfection!
‘'Will you take the path of pins or the path of needles?''
Serpents: A mystical, cryptic retelling of The Little Red Riding Hood.
Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga: So, when you vote for the Right, you are a fascist but when you vote Left you are a democrat?
Are you familiar with theories on paranoia?
I have no interest in anyone's wounded pride in thwarted Communist dreams and the only Baba Yaga I like is found in Russian tales and the John Wick movies. I'll just pretend this story never happened.
‘'But my gift to your child is pain. This child shall suffer and she will not understand why; she will suffer and she will always be alone in her suffering, world without end.''
Rats: A nightmarish retelling of The Sleeping Beauty, set in a world of sex, drugs and Rock n'Roll that was poetically tragic but didn't really make sense nor added any fresh breath into the original tale. I'll stick with that, thank you. 
‘'And I miss the light. I miss sunlight, candlelight, moonlight, starlight, streetlights, headlights, spotlights. All I have now are fluorescent lights, and I think they're the reason that I vanished in the first place. They've turned my skin translucent.''
Lost in the Supermarket: The Queen of Hearts has lured and imprisoned a girl in a supermarket. That is one of the most WTF stories I've ever read and I definitely enjoyed it.
Swimming: Parents-in-law (God, how I HATE this term...) can be rather intimidating. But what happens when they are utterly weird and obsessed with creating a house to rival the Versailles? What starts as a humorously strange story becomes a poignant, haunting fable in its shocking end.
‘'The girl is gone from the castle and her stepmother wanders the corridors.''
Lily Glass: A retelling of Snow White, set in the world of the Golden Age of Cinema. Three characters find themselves in the heart of a troubled and troubling relationship. One of the show-stoppers in the collection.
The Revenant: The chronicle of a highly dysfunctional relationship told through the narration of a Revenant. Not a fan of this one despite the haunting writing. I was 18 once, but I wasn't stupid and age should not be an alibi for degrading yourself. 
‘'In America, they don't let you burn. My mother told me that.''
Burning Girls: The story of a Jewish girl who has immigrated to the USA is the tale told so many times about the hands that built America. Yet, it has never been said in such a haunting, terrifying manner. This is a gothic, mystical, haunting retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, it's beyond gorgeous and THE best story in the collection.
‘'And I saw worse. The world around me teemed with flickering images, nightmarish visions of stone roads carrying metal beasts, of burning homes, of people pressed like livestock into mechanical carts, children crying, separated from their parents, toddlers' heads dashed against walls, of starvation, and our neighbours turning on us, only too glad to agree to our degradation and murder. The visions persisted no matter where I turned my head, and there was no reprieve, nor any justice, no justice anywhere.''
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