It took me a little while to warm up to this one but in the end I liked it. I wasn't convinced that his brother's fate was so terrible (oh no! Education!) but Juan's dedication to the cause sold me on listening to his story. I wasn't bothered by the repitition--it felt very appropriate for a fairy tale style, like the Gingerbread Man repitition mentioned earlier.
I didn't find the level of dark or realistic elements unrealistic. The nonchalance of the rape threat just seemed to imply to me how crappy Juan's day to day life is that that's just part of the day to be threatened like that. I think if he'd lost the bargain, I'd probably have been upset at seeing it go down but as a threat I thought it was fine.
As far as the dark elements I saw it as a throwback to old style fairy tales that were meant more to teach lessons to your kids by scaring the bejeezus out of them, rather than the touchy-feely happy ending Disney fairy tales of the modern age. So it totally all worked.
And, ugh, the scene with the grinding of the pixie... ugh... dark. Well done.
I listen to my podcasts when I commute, or when I go to the store, or do chores. It's interesting how I can sometimes get a strong association between the story and the setting I am in, so that recalling one immediately recalls the other. I was listening to this story as I walked the aisles of the Ax-Man store across the street from my work. They're a surplus store that has super-cheap bins of all kinds of random things, old useless computer chips, computer fans, chemistry supplies, just random stuff. I was there to buy rubber stoppers to fill a finger-sized hole in the side of my dishwasher so that I could run a screw through it and mount it to the side cabinet (so that it doesn't fall on my son when he's mobile enough to be in danger of that). The shelves of bins of random surplus felt appropriate for the story as I imagined the Zapatero's workshop looking cluttered and random like that.
http://ax-man.com/
