"Kindermarchen"

It's nice to see Howard Waldrop's latest collection, "A Horse of a Different Color", getting great reviews. It was just released last month by Small Beer Press. One of the stories Howard included was "Kindermarchen", which I published in Sentinel Science Fiction - the website I ran in 2007. Howard made note of that in his afterword for the story:

"I wrote this the morning of Friday, July 15, 2005, at Conestoga, a late-lamented convention in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I read it on Sunday afternoon and revised it the next week.

"It was bounced a couple of places (Ellen Datlow; F&ST) before Lou Antonelli who'd always wanted to publish something of mine, bought it for his website and paid me $25.

"It was ignored by the rest of the whole world."

Well, maybe it won't be ignored so much any more. I always was impressed with it, and it's also been cited in the positive reviews the collection has received so far.

Paul DiFilippo, writing in Locus last month: "A fairy tale dark and poignant is the brief 'Kindermarchen'".

Howard also got a great review by Dana Jennings in the New York Times on Tuesday. Jennings commented

"'Kindermarchen' takes the tale of Hansel and Gretel and transforms it into a haunting fable of the Holocaust."

"Kindermarchen" is a relatively short story, only 1,600 words. When I published it, I ran a photocopy of Howard's typed manuscript through some OCR software to convert it to a text file before I cleaned it up. I'm glad I took the effort and helped the story get some attention.