Stefanie Vor Schulte – Boy With A Black Rooster (2021, translated by Alexandra Roesch 2024)

“There is something so wrong about the fact that the boy, who has nothing but also shouldn’t have to do anything, possesses the greatest sense of decency, while the villagers make their rules and regulations on a whim, and are so content with themselves and their false lives that it’s downright obscene. How they warm one another by cackling and joking, gossiping, relishing a communal wallowing in the mud like pigs.”

Stefanie Vor Schulte’s Boy With A Black Rooster is a haunting debut novel that won the Mara Cassens Prize when it was published in its original German in 2021. Now it has been translated by Alexandra Roesch and is being published by The Indigo Press, allowing anglophone readers to fall under its spell. Boy With A Black Rooster is a surrealist post-apocalyptic fairy tale. Beautifully written and strikingly assured, the book creates a unique atmosphere, in which the moral starkness of the fairy tale is used to paint a portrait of a bleak and corrupted world, the only light of redemption coming from its Christlike hero. The end results is a powerful and discomforting novel that the reader will find difficult to shake off after its final pages. Roesch’s translation captures the sparse poetry of Vor Schulte’s language beautifully, and we are indebted to Indigo Press for bringing this work into the readership of English reading literature enthusiasts.

Boy With A Black Rooster is the story of Martin, an eleven-year-old boy who is the sole survivor of familial violence, an outcast in his own village. His one constant companion and only friend is his black rooster, a wise talking bird who accompanies him on all his adventures, whom the villagers fear is the devil. The villagers live in a constant state of poverty and misery, making their world which has been torn apart by the violence of war all the more unpleasant to live in by their selfishness and greed. Martin is an oasis of courage and heroism, and one day he leaves the village with a travelling painter, leading him on an adventure that will see him use his intelligence and cunning to solve mysteries, rescue kidnapped children and free the people from the tyranny of an evil princess. Across the ruined land, he meets various gangs of desperate and violent people. Martin and his rooster must maintain their goodness whilst avoiding all those who wish them harm, only to carry out Martin’s terrible secret destiny.

Vor Schulte’s world operates via a hazy fairytale logic, whilst at the same time taking a grimly pessimistic view of humanity. This is a delicate balancing act, one that Vor Schulte manages with aplomb. The story has a timeless quality – the technology is indistinct, the feudal lifestyles of the villagers and the princess in her castle could be ancient, or they could be in a near future where the calamities of the recent war have plunged people into a dismal medieval style of living. Similarly the magical realist element of the talking rooster positions the story in a kind of dreamlike make-believe world, which contrasts from the grimy brutality of the people who populate it. The overall effect is a constant state of uncanniness – the familiarness of the fairy tale language and motifs gives the story one shape and appearance, whilst the actions of its characters align it more with the kind of grimly real post-apocalyptic stories of John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956) or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). Boy With A Black Rooster is constantly shifting, welcoming in the reader with the illusion of cosiness only to brutally subvert it. The lineage of the Brothers Grimm at their most, well, grim shows clearly. 

Martin himself provides a crucial counterpoint to the gruelling brutality of the world around him. His inherent goodness and heroism provide a moral centre to the novel’s nihilism – Martin shows that even in a world full of violence and hate, it is possible to act heroically, albeit at a high price. And so we follow him and his rooster across a series of vignettes, each of which reveals a further nasty truth about the world around him even as it provides opportunities for Martin to show his heroism. This culminates in the figure of the princess, a fairy tale motif beautifully subverted into something truly horrible and nightmarish. Those with money and power are shown to be anything but wise and benevolent. A clever plot twist ties the princess and her reign of terror to the horrible fate of Martin’s family, providing extra motivation for Martin and the black rooster to bring an end to her tyranny. At the end of it all, Vor Schulte even manages to surprise us with the possibility of a happy ending. 

Boy With A Black Rooster is a short book, but manages to achieve a profound effect. Powerful and disconcerting, its nightmarish vision of a corrupt humanity eking out an existence in a ruined world is truly haunting, yet in its messianic hero it provides humanity with that most precious resource, hope. Vor Schulte’s novel is a triumph, and I hope this means we will see more of her work translated into English. 

Boy With A Black Rooster is available now. You can order your copy HERE