There are the facts you’ve heard, by now, again and again. About the erosion of bodily rights (abortion harder to access, sexual violence harder to prosecute). About the erosion of our rights to home (more children separated, fewer environmental protections). About women not being believed, women never being believed. The cultural devaluing of women’s stories is one reason why, Carmen Maria Machado says, so many may turn to speculative fiction. Writers and their readers are “seek[ing] ways to represent their experiences that are more subtle or less easy to pin reality on.” We tell it slant. We’ve done so for a long, long time.
Fairy tales and myths are one of the oldest ways to say what’s true. When the news (the world) (the woods) is overwhelming, I reach for stories that seek to tap into that history, stories that represent a conversation and community that goes back and beyond our current crises. Angela Carter wrote, “Ours is a highly individualized culture, with a great faith in the work of art as a unique one-off, and the artist as an original…But fairy tales are not like that, nor are their makers.” We’re not the first to fear the woods. After all this time, we can easily recognize a fairy tale by its parts: that shiver of familiarity when we realize the grandmother is the wolf; that glory when the wolf is disemboweled. What’s more, we can recognize the wolf in a nightgown as well as a designer suit. Because fairy tales are still true.
The fact is, neither oil lamp nor cell-phone flashlight can keep the monsters away. Still, fairy tales may be of use. Amber Sparks writes that “Traditional fairy tales … warn, rather than extol. They’re useful, which is a much older kind of feminism.” Once you know the danger, you can face it. Your mother can rescue you from Bluebeard, as in Angela Carter’s retelling; or, as in Robert Coover’s, you can become the captor yourself. The books below, a selection of novels and story collections, take fairy tales as their beginnings and reimagine them for the modern world. Not because they include things like new technology or other trappings of modernity (though some do) but because they look anew at the continually shocking, ever-present danger of being a woman or girl. Featuring murderers and rapists, husbands both abusive and well-meaning, patriarchy explicit as royal bloodlines and subtle as PTA meetings; mothers who abandon and mothers who protect; and, yes, getting lost in the woods, these books remake the old as not only a warning, but as a mode of collective power amidst the crises of our era.
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White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link is a collection that makes the familiar strange once again, drawing on tales from Grimm classics, Scottish ballads, and Norwegian folklore. These are less retellings than hallucinations, dreamed late at night or perhaps in a parallel universe. A story of abandoned android siblings on a mysterious planet takes on a more sinister, tragic tone when read with the subtitle “Hansel and Gretel.” My favorite story, “The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear,” (inspired by “The Boy Who Did Not Know Fear”) incorporates an explicit retelling by an airline passenger into an uncanny, absolutely chilling nighttime-logic world populated only by women.
Bestiary by K-Ming Chang is a story of three generations of women that intertwines Taiwanese myths with a story of immigration to America. The unnamed daughter finds herself connected to the spirit Hu Gu Po (who eats the toes of children in order to live in the body of a woman) when she grows a tiger tail. I love this novel because it is nearly choked with magic: a brother and abusive father turn into flying kites as they fight; a queer grandfather births a crab-child through his passionate love affair with a pirate; the daughter learns her family history by feeding birds to yawning holes in her yard. Chang’s language, too, is that of fairy tales, both gorgeous and matter-of-fact in its descriptions of violence, full of wild images that seem to invent themselves.
The Museum of Human History by Rebekah Bergman complicates the story of a sleeping beauty (a twin who has slept for 25 years without aging) by placing it alongside an age-old tale of corporate greed. The novel features a missing mother and her top-secret biotech research, celebrity anti-aging treatments, and an opioid epidemic characterized by needle-pricks that mirror the prick of a spindle. Bergman has built out a world that feels much heavier than that of Aurora’s curse. Here, forgetting and sleep and countless destroyed lives are merely side effects of a company’s ruthless striving for profit.
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter is a collection that transforms tales like “Beauty and the Beast” and “Bluebeard” into stories of female desire, transformation, and the dangerous boldness of women and girls. The stories are told in lush, forested prose, with a lip-curling pleasure that makes them deeply subversive. Wolves circle these tales, meeting Red Riding Hood in multiple forms—“There are some eyes can eat you”—and mothers play their parts as killers, martyrs, and saviors—“You never saw such a wild thing as my mother.”
The Seas by Samantha Hunt takes the myth of the mermaid as its point of departure. It tells the story of a young woman in a fishing village who, grieving her drowned father, believes that she is a mermaid–and that as a result she must eventually murder the Iraq veteran she loves. The lives of mother and daughter mirror each other (“my mother is regularly torn between being herself and being my mother”) as shimmering prose blurs the line between reality and madness, until the blurring is the point. Storytelling itself is a subject, and the novel brilliantly revels in slant repetition of scenes, histories, and words.
Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi is a retelling of Hansel and Gretel that is actually a story of mothers and daughters, immigrants from a mysterious land called Druhástrana. The trappings of fairy tale land (wealthy family, abused peasants, magical changelings) overlap with those of real-world England, with its PTA meetings and beeping hospitals. In Druhástrana, gingerbread is produced in a dreadful factory; back in England, talking puppets help tell a winding story that unravels ideas of class and country, those arbitrary human constructs. In fact, Gingerbread is most fairy tale-like in its intuitive, associative logic. As Amelia Brown writes in Ploughshares, “it captures the systems of the world, rather than the systems of the individual.”
My Mother She Killed My, My Father He Ate Me edited by Kate Bernheimer is a compendium of retellings by some of the greats of the form, as well as writers who take less obvious inspiration from fairy tales. Bernheimer (editor of the Fairy Tale Review and great scholar of fairy tales) sees in these stories a growing awareness of human separation from the natural world, in which “violence, suffering, and beauty are shared,” leading to “an invocation to protect those most endangered.” In these stories, Baba Yaga confronts John James Audubon’s real-life affinity for killing birds (Joy Williams); the Erlking appears at a Waldorf school fair (Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum); and Jack, his farm destroyed by dust storms, spits off the edge of a skyscraper (Michael Martone).
The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns is a novel based on the Grimm story of the same name, about a wealthy couple that wishes only for a child. Eventually, the much-desired boy is killed by his jealous stepmother and fed to his grieving father (“My mother she killed me, my father he ate me”), and transforms into a bird. The novel is told from the point of view of Bella, the poor single mother of a biracial toddler, who befriends a wealthy couple and ultimately becomes the stepmother of the fairy tale. This feminist retelling explores class, race, and late twentieth century feminism by eschewing traditional narrative logic and allowing Bella a chance to emerge, despite the horrors done, despite the mortal sin of wanting too much.
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado is a collection with a bubbling undertone of horror. My favorite story, “The Husband Stitch,” is party inspired by “The Girl With The Green Ribbon,” a tale most millennials will recognize from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark author Alvin Schwartz—itself likely inspired by the French Revolution practice of using a red ribbon to mark where a head was severed and reattached. “The Husband Stitch” incorporates dream-logic stories within stories, direct address to the reader, and the real-life medical horror of the “husband stitch.” It works so well because the two main threads (the green ribbon and the husband stitch) rhyme: they are both about what it means to be vulnerable with a “good” man, to be worn down by sexism, and to have a female body under patriarchy.
Ninetails by Sally Wen Mao is a story collection that reimagines the nine-tailed fox spirit of Asian folklore, kaleidoscopic and contemporary. One Brooklyn-based fox spirit writes a guidebook to seducing and stealing the life force from mortal men, especially those who believe they are systematically oppressed because “they can’t find someone willing to fuck them.” Another spirit mourns her human life as an exotic dancer and poet between fleeing foxhunters and their hounds. In fact, much of this book is about hunting—men hunting foxes, immigrants, girls—and another, more satisfying kind of hunting: revenge.
And I Do Not Forgive You by Amber Sparks is a collection of “stories and other revenges” that began as exercises in catharsis during the #MeToo movement. The stories pull from fairy tales—including an utterly satisfying, loneliness-as-happily-ever-after retelling of “Donkey Skin”—and other myths and monsters. Sparks has a particular ear for how contemporary language and obsessions can nestle smartly into the grander tones of her source material. Matter-of-factness in texting a son or ghosting a friend meets matter-of-factness with regards to violence. Athena designs a video game to troll her rapist father, Zeus; Alice drinks Jim Beam in a motel; the Sabine women promise, “We would eat evil men like mice.”
