Fairytales

I love fairytales.  Who doesn’t?  The creepier and darker, the better.   

So, when I saw a man leading his pet rabbit around the park recently, my mind jumped into fairytale mode.   

The result was “The Man with the Killer Rabbit” a fun, short story I wrote for Blue Sea Writers on Medium. 

Now, I’m tinkering with the fairytale format on a variety of stories and I’m realizing that my favorites tend to be … well … kind of dark.

The Little Mermaid. Hans Christen Andersen’s original tragedy of the doomed mermaid.  Although, Disney’s was certainly entertaining.

Bluebeard.   The original fairytale is pretty gruesome but I also adore the poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay that ingeniously flips the story upside down.   And Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Bluebeard, is one of the funniest books I’ve read about the meaning of art and learning how to live with others while coming to terms with yourself. 

Some of my favorite modern fairytales:

Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones.  A brilliant story of how a young woman turns the curse of old age to her advantage through the magic power of words.  So good that Hayao Miyazaki turned it into a terrific Anime movie.

And I really enjoyed listening to Christina Henry’s Lost Boy, a reimagining of Peter Pan through the eyes of Jamie, a young Captain Hook.   In fact, she has turned a whole slew of fairy tales inside out that I will now have to read!  

Little Red always had a bit of Wolf in her