Ebook220 pages3 hours
These Children Who Come at You with Knives, and Other Fairy Tales: Stories
By Jim Knipfel
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
3/5
()
About this ebook
From the irresistibly droll mind of Jim Knipfel comes These Children Who Come at You with Knives, and Other Fairy Tales, a series of twisted fables that echo with pinpoint acuity.
A masterful storyteller whose memoirs and novels have earned him widespread acclaim, this is Knipfel’s first foray into the short story, and he delivers in spades: this wickedly dark satire on the notion of happily ever after turns the traditional fairy tale on its head.
Among the array of lonely losers wallowing in discontent, the enterprising reader of this volume may meet a talking chicken who learns the world has little patience for intelligence, a foul-mouthed gnome set on world domination, and a magical snowman wrestling with the horror of being alive.
In These Children Who Come at You with Knives, Knipfel’s singular and brilliantly funny mind reinvents the bedtime story and offers up a wildly entertaining meditation on the perils of human nature.
A masterful storyteller whose memoirs and novels have earned him widespread acclaim, this is Knipfel’s first foray into the short story, and he delivers in spades: this wickedly dark satire on the notion of happily ever after turns the traditional fairy tale on its head.
Among the array of lonely losers wallowing in discontent, the enterprising reader of this volume may meet a talking chicken who learns the world has little patience for intelligence, a foul-mouthed gnome set on world domination, and a magical snowman wrestling with the horror of being alive.
In These Children Who Come at You with Knives, Knipfel’s singular and brilliantly funny mind reinvents the bedtime story and offers up a wildly entertaining meditation on the perils of human nature.
Author
Jim Knipfel
Jim Knipfel is the author of three memoirs, Slackjaw, Quitting the Nairobi Trio, and Ruining It for Everybody, and three novels, Noogie’s Time to Shine, The Buzzing, and Unplugging Philco. He lives in Brooklyn.
Read more from Jim Knipfel
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Reviews for These Children Who Come at You with Knives, and Other Fairy Tales
Rating: 3.1739130608695656 out of 5 stars
3/5
23 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Super quick read. Often disgusting/disturbing (stories about maggots, roaches and bodily fluids). Yet somehow it was a compelling, humorous read. I typically hate short stories, and struggle to get through an entire book of them, but I was quite entertained through the whole book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fairy tales for adults in which bad things happen and everything from yard gnomes to snowmen talk and cuss. Very lighthearted book. I tried to find a moral to the stories but eventually learned they're just for entertainment. I could find no higher meaning behind any of these enjoyable stories.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Relentlessly, spectacularly vulgar, Knipfel's fairy tales harken back to a bawdier oral tradition and are filled with crude, scatalogical humor and characters either hopelessly inept or completely reprehensible. While the tales are initially charming (and perhaps a bit nauseating), there isn't enough variety in tone or atmosphere to keep the reader's momentum going through the entire collection. My personal breaking point came along about the same time as the tale of invisible elves strewing mucus, urine, and fecal matter down a suburban street.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Everything you need to know about Jim Knipfel is right there on the last page of his latest book: “Jim Knipfel lives in Brooklyn, where he is not welcome in family-friendly establishments.” Knipfel’s collection of short stories, These Children Who Come at You With Knives, goes a long way toward explaining why.For a child of the ’70s who grew up on the Twisted Fairy Tales that were the highlight of the Bullwinkle and Rocky Show, this compendium of cracked morality tales reads like a lost season, had the cartoon been moved to late night cable and been written by Rod Serling, Jim Thompson, and Hubert Selby, Jr.Although there isn’t any redemption to be found in these fairy tales, those looking for nuggets of good advice could easily mine this book for gold:1. Don’t trust princesses.2. Don’t piss off a gnome.3. Plants ain’t no good. (As we learn in the cleverly titled, Plants Ain’t No Good.)4. Don’t let talking horses buy firearms (or frequent hookers).5. No, seriously, don’t piss off a gnome.
Book preview
These Children Who Come at You with Knives, and Other Fairy Tales - Jim Knipfel
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