With Halloween fast approaching, most people want to know the best ghost stories to tell to their friends and family.

I had hoped to find a few good tales from other countries that were unheard of in America. “There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill her Neighbor’s Baby,” a collection of Russian scary fairy tails by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, seemed to be the ideal source for new and exciting material.

I found myself more and more disappointed as I read. These tales, though reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm, were not frightening or compelling at all.

Translated from Russian to English, these stories were all written from a Russian perspective. They were about war-ravaged communities, mandatory military service, refugees living in poverty and grief and despair everywhere.

Almost nobody alive today can remember the last time the United States had war-ravaged communities, so it was difficult for me to empathize with the characters, having never known the culture before.

“Hygiene,” one of my favorite of the short stories, was about a cramped and impoverished urban community, where a family tries to overcome an epidemic that sweeps the town. It shows the family’s struggle and eventual descent into madness with the little girl becoming the sole survivor.

Petrushevskaya’s books were banned in Russia until the collapse of the Soviet Union. I would have thought, because of this, that Petrushevskaya wrote about very controversial and taboo topics. These tales, however, were confusing and not very relatable to contemporary American readers.

The stories were so dreamlike and bizarre, that I had trouble wrapping my head around them. Just as dreams are only understandable while you’re still dreaming, this book was only understandable in a dreamlike state.

I tried to keep an open mind, but in the end I simply could not bridge the cultural differences between American writing and Russian writing. There were parts where I expected her to explain where she did not, and there were elements that seemed irrelevant to me, but were explained in great detail. This can go back to cultural differences in writing or something could simply have been lost in translation.

I am sure that if anybody wanted to retell Petrushevskaya’s stories at Halloween, they would want to Americanize it in some way so it could relate to their audience. The stories, as written, were not impressive enough to warrant a high rating from me.