Spectral Visions: Grim Fairy Tales - Tapa blanda

We are the stories that we tell ourselves. We are the stories that other people tell about us (or that we believe that they tell about us, which is a different thing altogether). Our society is shaped by the stories and narratives that are told about it. Sometimes those stories are fairy tales. Grim(m), cautionary tales that tell us to watch our steps and follow the rules or something will come for us and we won’t like it. Stories that tell us not to walk through the woods, at least not on this night, and under that moon. Fairy tales teach us that sometimes you follow all the rules, you stick to the path, you don’t stray into the forest or sleep on that particular grassy hill, you do what mother and father tell you, and you don’t speak to strangers...but one day on a lonely path there they are anyway, waiting for you. Fairy tales remind us that life itself is arbitrary and capricious and appeasing it, for a while, is the best that we can do. The fairy stories that we tell ourselves are full of wonder but also full of dread, and some of the puckish folk that populate them are all spite and scheming, Lilith’s children who know their place: above us. Neil Gaiman wrote (paraphrasing GK Chesterton) that ’fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.’ He’s right, and that’s a good thing to know. You can tweak the dragon’s tail and run away to live happily ever after. But on the other hand, sometimes they eat you. For writers, there are other kinds of stories that we tell ourselves. Writing is something that someone else can do, not me. There are no new stories left to write, everything has been said. I’ll never be a writer. Rejection means give up. I am no good at this. Other people are better. No one will want to read this. I should give up. The authors whose work you will read here come from across the UK and indeed, across the world. Many of them are students of creative writing, at the University of Sunderland (home of Spectral Visions) or elsewhere, and one of the most valuable things such programmes can do is to support students in telling themselves a different set of stories. I can write, and I will write. I have stories to tell. I can improve. I will persist. I will develop and grow. I will keep writing and I will get rejected and I will go back and write more. I have stories to tell, and I can tell them. You see the results here: vivid re-imaginings of the traditional fairy tale from cultures familiar and unfamiliar, explorations of new and exciting approaches to the form, poetry and prose and illustration. The stories in this collection explore the many echoes between the traditional fairy tale and the gothic: the uncanny, the grotesque and the fear of darkness, death and worlds unknown seeping through it all like rot through damp timber. Welcome to Spectral Visions: Grim Fairy Tales. You may think that you have spent just minutes reading this collection, only to put it down and discover that a whole day has passed. That’s fairyland for you.