Take a photo of a barcode or cover
tasharobinson 's review for:
The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror
by Daniel M. Lavery
I admit I'm just not sure what the author's doing with this very short collection of revamped fairy tales, which also includes a reimagined version of "The Velveteen Rabbit" where the rabbit is a horrific monster that steals the Realness from other Real things, and a dark mashup of Wind in the Willows Donald Barthelme's short story "Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby" where Mr. Toad's friends endlessly abuse and gaslight him. That latter story has an interesting insight in it, about how in the original Wind in the Willows, the other animals are awfully invested in what Mr. Toad is and isn't allowed to do. But the story is very repetitive and circular, and it doesn't reach any sort of conclusion, unlike Barthelme's story — it just kind of stops in the middle of one awful, oppressive go-round. There's a lot of gaslighting and emotional abuse in these stories, but virtually none of the catharsis that comes with a good fable, because several of the stories don't really reach conclusions, and in the ones that do, the protagonists don't have much emotional awareness to realize when they've won. One of the more baffling stories here for me was the sorta-modern "Beauty and the Beast" retelling that makes the hapless father into an investments-driven mother, but doesn't otherwise do much to update that story. It's never really clear what the Beast in this version is, and in the end, when Beauty refuses to marry him, he just dies. Okay, I can see that being a sort of dark feminist twist — it's not her responsibility to fix him by giving herself to him — but again, the execution is somewhat circular and heavily externalized, and I never had any idea what either of the main characters were feeling. At least one of these stories (the Little Mermaid retelling) was part of the author's "Children’s Stories Made Horrific" series over at The Toast, but none of the stories here had the insight and impact of Ortberg's "Curious George" retelling from that series. Fairy tales are the last thing that should need explanation, but I wound up feeling like I needed more of an explanation of what the author was trying to do here.