the work

Experimental and fierce, this is the work, written in 1989, that first enunciated the beginning of Krause's style and direction. 

Set in an unnamed village where fog, ritual, and superstition shape daily life, Children of Mud is told in a collective voice that murmurs like a chorus—part prayer, part curse. Darkly humorous and steeped in biblical and folkloric cadence, it traces the villagers’ attempts to understand a world forever slipping into myth. Precursor to The Greater Good and Berliners, this novella is a brutal, beautiful fable about the thin flame of hope that flickers even in a world fashioned from mud.

Praise for Children of Mud

Children of Mud—the dark wellspring from which Berliners and The Greater Good ultimately arise—is a mythic, communal novel set in a nameless rural village where stories, superstitions, and collective desires wield more power than any law. Told in a haunting first-person plural voice, the book blends parable, folklore, and biblical cadence to chart a society that reshapes reality through shared delusion. Children become mobs; priests become sacrifices; heroes are manufactured from rumor and mud. Out of these warped rituals emerge the origins of the moral crises that later echo through the author’s broader cycle.

Stylistically, Children of Mud stands in a lineage that includes Faulkner’s choral grotesque, Bruno Schulz’s mythmaking dream-logic, Cormac McCarthy’s biblical austerity, Isak Dinesen’s folkloric fatalism, and the uneasy innocence of Tarjei Vesaas—all inflected with a darkly comic undercurrent reminiscent of Bulgakov. Yet the novel’s voice is wholly its own: communal, incantatory, and unsettlingly intimate, as though an entire village were whispering its history into the reader’s ear.

As the foundational text of the cycle, Children of Mud exposes the pre-historical roots of moral collapse—how myth hardens into ideology, how fear masquerades as faith, and how a community can talk itself into salvation or ruin with equal conviction. It is a work of eerie beauty and ruthless clarity, establishing the cosmology from which the later novels draw their moral and psychological depth.