Recommended by Cathy: "This is a collection of short stories. These are not your Disney friendly favorites! All the usual heroines are now homicidal and sociopathic bad girls. Snow White is a vampire. Red Riding Hood is becoming a Werewolf, thanks to gran'ma. The Pied Piper doesn't just take the children. He curses them with sterility. Cinderella is the daughter of a witch, her stepmother and stepsisters turn out to be lovely people you just want to kill. Rapunsel lets down her hair and pulls up a demon from Hell. You get the idea."

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #559923 in Books
• Published on: 1983-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 186 pages

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Customer Reviews

O yes, it's Grimmer! :> but well worth it
About 20 years or so ago, I first sat down on a bookstore floor to begin the book, and hunted it down for myself years later. Some of the tales so haunted me that I had to find them and reread them to see if I recalled them rightly, or had confused them. Tanith Lee's style makes for a perfectly warped yet new angle to see fairy tales from. Was Snow White's stepmother Queen so wicked? Was Cinderella so abused? Did the Brothers Grimm ever make you ponder such things? If not, the Sisters Grimmer will!

Please be warned, if the macabre and morbid are not your cup of tea, you won't like this. But if you can stretch your mind, allow other images and/or interpretations to be possible, lush and frighening that they might be - then I highly recommend the Princess-Royal of Fantasy. :> And if you've tried her Paradys books, that will prepare somewhat for this - not always as colorful, but as starkly mad.

Enjoy!

Gothic re-tellings of classic fairytales
Tanith Lee provides a darker, more gothic feel to the classic fairytales we all know: Snow White is a creature of the night in "Red As Blood;" Little Red Riding Hood has meets a very different kind of wolf in "Wolfland;" Rapunzel's prince is more sinister in "The Golden Rope;" plus six othe re-tellings. Each one takes place in a specific time and place on Earth, mostly in the past - with the one exception being "Beauty," Lee's re-telling of Beauty and the Beast, set on Earth in the distant future. Even thought the titles of the stories have changed, Lee makes it easy to figure out which story is being re-rold. It's a bit too dark for children, but for fans of horror and gothic tales, this makes a great addition to your reading list.

Fairytales through a glass darkly
One of the most original collections of fairytales that I have read. It begins with the tale of the Pied Piper. What happens when a god descends to the flaws of mortals? Snow White is a less than generic vampire tale, with a strong mideval christian cast to it. The prose is crisp and stark and strangely beautiful like the rest of tanith lee's work, underlying meanings throb in the thicket of words like white flowers.