Dark Narratives: The Twitterverse Implosion

Plus, a look at horror fairytales

As I write this, the time has just changed and my eyes and brain are adjusting to the difference in light. There is something luxurious about glancing outside to see the sun in the wrong place and knowing that you still have time to change the course of your morning. It’s a short-lived pleasure, and its charm wears off quickly when darkness falls at 4pm, but I’ll take what I can get.

The social side of the internet has been more chaotic than usual these last few days following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk. It’s impossible to say for sure what the fall-out of this will be, but at the moment there’s a lot of talk about alternative platforms, a lot of speculating about what the future of social media might hold, and a lot of fear and uncertainty about what’s going to happen to authors and booksellers if the internet becomes more decentralized.

Will forums make a comeback? It remains to be seen, but all the same I jumped at the opportunity to join the newly minted Keenedom, a writer forum hosted by Brian Keene. I’m a sucker for an old-fashioned forum, and this one has dedicated space for communing with and about your favorite big names in horror — don’t miss it.

I am not an expert in anything and I do not feel qualified to speculate at this point. I will however make a plug for newsletters (like this one you are presently reading!) as a way to stay in touch with readers and to keep a finger on the pulse of book world.

To that end, I’ve been assembling a list of newsletters and author websites, and I suggest you do the same. Below are a few others I know to follow right here on Substack — drop me a comment with other newsletters you recommend!

To call something a fairytale is, often, to deride it for being optimistic and impractical. A happily-ever-after for one's life is a childish dream. But those who would judge fairytales as the work of wide-eyed dreamers are missing -- or have forgotten -- that the roots of modern horror are planted in the rich soil of those old fairy stories. And there, at the intersection of the sublime and horrific, lie some great truths about human experience. Let's talk about the darkness of fairytales.

What Do We Mean by “Fairytale”?

If we’re going to talk about fairytales, we’d best start by defining our terms. It’s a broad topic, and one I won’t go too deep into here, but suffice to say that fairytales are a subset of folklore, which is itself storytelling passed along by way of oral tradition, often among the common folk. But while myths and legends (also a type of oral folklore) carry with them at least some expectation of veracity or tie to history, fairytales historically have been removed from reality. They happen “one upon a time, in a land far away” and deal with events that are fantastic and magical. In many cases, this distance is introduced when local oral traditions are transcribed, stripped of cultural context, and repackaged for mass appeal.

In modern parlance, when a new piece of work is described as being a fairytale, that usually means one of two things (or both). One, that it is inspired by or adapted from an existing bit of folklore. Two, that it operates on “fairytale logic” or aesthetic. By which I mean: explicitly implausible forms of fiction, that signal to the audience right away that they do not take place in our reality or follow reality's rules.

All fiction is of course a fabrication, and a great deal of genre fiction deals with things that are fantastical or unreal. But fairytales are unapologetically implausible stories that are truer-than-true, driving at the heart of how things feel in a way that creates emotional resonance. The same as impressionist art invokes a feeling more successfully than photorealism, fairytale-style storytelling creates a space for exploring themes, interpersonal conflict, social problems, and so forth.

In this way, fairytales are often allegorical. They may sometimes be fables or parables that carry moral messages about the world. But they don’t have to be. They can be perfectly self-contained, weird little stories that nevertheless bend reality around them rather than attempting to be believable.

**Of Note: Throughout the rest of this, I’ll be primarily talking about “fairytales” in the context of European tales, both as a manner of limiting scope and because they’re the ones I’m most familiar with. We’ll have to save the others for a different day :)

Fairytale Logic and Story Structure

Modern fiction, which has largely been written under the influence of capitalism and market demands and the advice of “good writers” for a couple centuries, usually follows a pretty standard structure. There are certain internalized rules and expectations in regards to what makes a story satisfying.

Those rules were not in place when many fairytales were originally invented. When preserved in their most original forms, these stories often laugh in the face of narrative structure. The results are frequently off-putting and often delightfully weird.

This is one of the first things that gets lost when a story is adapted (and sanitized) for a modern retelling.

Consider, for example, the difference between a Sleeping Beauty tale where a chaste kiss from a prince awakens the princess…and one where she is impregnated while unconscious and awoken only by chance when one of the resulting infants attempts to suckle her finger and unwittingly removes the cursed splinter. Or a version of Little Red Riding Hood where a friendly woodcutter rescues the girl from the wolf’s belly…and the version where the girl is systematically fed bits of her grandmother’s flesh before being lured naked into bed with the wolf (who eats her right up).

It’s a mistake to assume, however, that “the original” version of any given fairytale is always darker and more gruesome than a modern variant.

For one thing, this violence was often added on purpose. The Brothers Grimm, for example, were not precisely scrupulous historians in their quest to transcribe oral traditions into a tome of stories. They wrote down well-known-at-the-time tales but frequently made them more violent or overtly moralistic in order to better suit their intended child audience (who, I suppose, they felt needed to be scared straight from time to time). Once Walt Disney got hold of these fairytales later, the pendulum swung the other way (for the same “think of the children” reasoning, ironically).

For another, it’s not always evident what “the original” version of a story even alludes to. In some cases, we have a clear idea of authorship. We know that Hans Christian Andersen wrote stories like “The Little Mermaid” and “The Ugly Duckling” and there is an authoritative original version to point to. But stories like “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Cinderella” were in circulation for centuries before anyone ever thought to write them down. So be wary any time you see someone make claims about a definitive origin story to some famous fairytales.

All the same, it is indisputable that at least some versions of well-known fairytales were indeed dark, frightening, and hardly clear-cut in their moral logic.

So, you know. Horror.

The Enduring Appeal of Fairytales

One reason we likely enjoy fairytales so much is simply familiarity. For many of us, these are the stories we first grew up reading or listening to or watching on television, and seeing them remixed brings us pleasure. But I do think the longevity of these stories goes deeper than that.

We talked at the beginning of the year about Medieval morality plays and their long-standing relationship with horror. While not as overtly moral or allegorical, fairytales do have life lessons woven into their DNA.

Because these stories originated in a time when life was hard and death often lurked around the corner, many of these lessons are pretty bleak. They warn you about the dangers of duplicitous figures, husbands who are secretly monsters (and monsters who are secretly princes). They also sometimes bear warnings to wicked stepparents and others who might intend harm on the innocent — and promise rewards to those who walk a more righteous path.

But above all else, fairytales quite often seem to value cleverness and resilience, the sort of traits most often prized in slasher movie Final Girls. Indeed, a great deal of these fairytale survivors are young girls, making the Final Girl trope arguably older than the written word.

Consider:

• Hansel and Gretel work together to deceive and ultimately overpower the witch who holds them hostage. It’s sister Gretel who strikes the killing blow, locking the cannibalistic witch in the oven.

• In “Fitcher’s Bird,” the youngest sister of a family uses cleverness and an even temper to rescue her siblings from a murderous husband, reassembling and reanimating their murdered corpses. Not only does she deceive the husband, she uses a bit of his own medicine on him before arranging for his satisfying execution.

• Though some versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” end with the titular heroine either rescued or gobbled up, several older versions end with her (and sometimes Grandma) defeating the wolf through trickery.

• “Donkeyskin” (and its many variations), one of my personal favorites in the canon of “what the fuck?” fairytales, tells of a princess who disguises herself to flee the king’s incestuous desire for her, then rather aggressively courts a prince in a neighboring kingdom.

• Molly Whuppie protects her siblings from a child-eating ogre by feeding its own children to it — then, for good measure, steals the ogre’s treasure and arranges royal marriages for her siblings. #GirlBoss

There are many more. Curiously, these resilient young heroines are one of the first things to vanish from many adaptations, sometimes disappearing as quickly as (male) writers could collect the stories from their (female) oral storytellers. Hmm.

Strange, Dark Fairytales of Then and Now

But all right. You want to see some tales for yourself. Where to begin?

There are so many dark, strange, surreal and bizarrely hilarious fairytales. There are scholars who have dedicated their whole lives to tracking down and classifying fairytales and their nearest thematic relatives, and the culmination of this research exists in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) index, where more than 2,000 known stories and their variants are collected and categorized.

Most of us grew up learning at least a handful of fairytales, so you might enjoy doing a bit of digging to find the origins of the stories you enjoy. If you’re looking for a more curated experience, there are numerous collections of fairytales available to suit any taste. For our purposes, a solid contender is Grimm’s Grimmest, a selection of bloodsoaked Grimm’s fairytales beautifully illustrated by Tracy Arah Dockray. A more academic resource would be The Classic Fairy Tales, collected by Maria Tatar.

There are, of course, also countless fairytale remixes and retellings, more than I could possibly hope to list here. As a sampler to get you started, I recommend Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, a seminal 1970s feminist work and bangin’ good retelling of multiple tales.

Robin McKinley is the author of numerous spectacular novel-length fairytale retellings. I recommend Deerskin and Rose Daughter to get you started.

More recently, T. Kingfisher has entered the horror-fairytale arena with The Seventh Bride, which weaves together notes of “Bluebeard,” “The Robber Bridegroom” and “Mr. Fox” into a wholly new narrative.

There’s also the Grimm Fairy Tales comic series, which combine classic and modern threads of fairytales. On a similar note is The Wolf Among Us, a comic series (later adapted into a fantastic video game) that brings fairytale characters into a gritty urban setting.

If horror movies are more your speed, I’d heartily recommend Tale of Tales, an anthology film of Italian fairytales adapted as faithfully as possible. Pair that off with The Company of Wolves, a dreamlike werewolf story written by Angela Carter and filmed by Neil Jordan.

There’s also Belladonna of Sadness, a 1970s Japanese animated film that, depending who you ask, is either erotic exploitation or second wave feminism — but either way, spins an enchantingly dark narrative about a woman’s deal with the devil. (Heads up for some artistically rendered but very intense sexual violence, though).

If you’re looking for something a bit more modern, there is of course Guillermo del Toro’s classic Pan’s Labyrinth, in which fairytale and harsh reality collide. I’m also quite fond of the 2007 Korean film Hansel and Gretel, although it’s less a retelling of that story and more in the vein of Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always. (Incidentally, although Barker is perhaps better known for his splatterpunk work, many of his stories indulge in fairytale themes. In a way, even Hellraiser is a bit of a fairytale itself).

I have undoubtedly missed many excellent additions to this list, and will probably remember several as soon as this goes live. So tell me — what are your favorite fairytales? And which adaptations have you most enjoyed?

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