The First Horror Stories Were Fairy Tales

Gather by the fire if you dare.

Ah, fairy tales. You know, like “The Little Mermaid” and its happily-ever-after ending, where the doe-eyed mermaid gets her legs and singing voice back just in time to marry the equally doe-eyed prince. Or “Snow White,” where the evil queen gets her just desserts from an unfortunate lightning strike.

Pure and utter bullshit.

No, I’m not on some kind of feminist rant—I simply read fairy tales and not the sanitized, consumer-friendly versions offered by Disney and other purveyors of suburban childhood. I grew up with the original, original fairy tales, like the Andrew Lang Fairy Books, a collection of stories and fairy folklore spanning the late 1800s to early 1900s, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, published in 1812, and Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen, first published in 1899.

These versions were a bit more…horrific. Granted, they were designed to be told around some kind of rustic hearth to instill terror into the hearts of children so they didn’t go off wandering alone in the woods or moors.

But that’s a nuance lost on a 6-year old.

I was sure the wild-haired Struwwelpeter, a tailor with scissors for hands, would cut off my thumb if I continued to suck it. I heard the screams of the evil queen in “Snow White” as she was forced to dance to death, wearing red-hot iron shoes. And the ending of “The Little Mermaid,” where she gains a soul but loses her life and turns to foam, was downright spooky. Don’t even get me started about what really happened to Little Red Riding Hood.

And people wonder why I write horror.

But I think horror aligns with those fairy tale origins, a brute reflection on the dangers that lie just beneath our facade of safeness. And beneath the scare—a warning.

In my novel Poe, it was the danger of becoming mired in grief and hopelessness, and in Dead Souls, allowing a major emotional upheaval to make you vulnerable to manipulation. The Nightmarchers, which will be published in print this fall, should put the fear of God in anyone thinking they can muck around with nature and come out unscathed.

Our current hubris is that action doesn’t cause a reaction, that our ideologies can deliver choices without consequences, and that if there are consequences, they’ll impact those people over there—not us.

But if you enter the cabin in the woods and eat food that’s not yours, claim space that’s not yours, and make a mess of it in the process, you don’t get a fright from some anthropomorphic bears before running off to let them clean up.

In the earliest telling of Goldilocks, they throw you into the fire.

So maybe it’s time to bring the original, more horrific, fairy tales back. To remember the things we’ve collectively chosen to forget.

While we still can.