Snow White, Blood Red - Edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling

This book was read as part of the Once Upon a Time VI reading challenge at Stainless Steel Droppings.

This is the first volume in several collections of retold fairy tales or stories inspired by them, co-edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.  The book contains introductions by each editor and 20 stories by well-known and not so well-known authors.  Many take place in contemporary settings and feature strong sexual and/or horror themes.  Some of them are original stories in the fairy tale tradition (Susan Wade's heartbreaking Like a Red, Red Rose).   Many are modern retellings of popular fairy tales (in Wendy Wheeler's Little Red, the "wolf" has an affair with a woman in her grandmother's inherited cottage, then develops an appetite for her teenage daughter) and others fantastic (the mechanical house in Tanith Lee's Snow Drop, in which the magic mirror has been supplanted by a television).  Some tales are lightly humorous (Gahan Wilson's The Frog Prince; Elizabeth Lynn's The Princess in the Tower), and one made me laugh out loud (Persimmon by Harvey Jacobs).  My favorites would probably be The Moon is Drowning While I Sleep by Charles de Lint and A Sound, Like Angels Singing by Leonard Rysdyk.


Not all of the stories will appeal to all readers because of the raw and brutal aspects of some of the tales  Still, we have been told that the originals of the fairy stories read to children or seen on screen as Disney versions were originally really brutal and grim (no pun intended).  The book offers a good variety of writing styles and themes.  I thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend it with the above reservation.