Link’s new collection is just as conceptually twisty. Quotidian details place the story squarely in the real world (the protagonist’s deceased mother, for instance, sewed a quilt adorned with Star Wars characters for one of her children), yet Emma blithely acknowledges that she lives in a palace and has a “fairy godfather.” Link doesn’t go fully meta, but the story gives one the uncanny sensation of blurred lines, of slippage between the known world and the surreal. Where the Brothers Grimm’s and Andersen’s stories take place strictly in the world of fantasy, Link’s young protagonist, Emma, seems to sense that she exists in a fairy tale, but she has no power to escape this morbid realm.

Read: The book that teaches us to live with our fearsĪt the same time, “Swans” manipulates its source material with precocious flair.

Link complicates the evil-stepmother trope by showing that, in parenting, morality isn’t always black and white. In her 2000 story “Swans,” for example, Link combines the darker elements of two of the most famous tales-“Cinderella” and “Rumpelstiltskin”-with the elegant horror of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Wild Swans.” In this mash-up, a young princess of magical provenance learns what it costs to retain her humanness in the arbitrarily cruel world of adults. In doing so, she challenges readers to question the archetypes they take for granted. She combines everyday banalities with unsettlingly bizarre elements, ultimately showing how hazy the borders between magic and reality are. Kelly Link, the author of the new story collection White Cat, Black Dog, masterfully twists familiar source material into unexpected, new shapes. Go too far one way or the other, and the story is likely to flop with audiences longing for that perfect paradox: comforting strangeness. But what the best updated fairy tales have in common is the way they strike a careful balance between revisionist novelty and faithful takes on the familiar. The hit 2010s television show Once Upon a Time remixed just about every fairy-tale character and trope. Best-selling authors such as Marissa Meyer cleverly recycle the likes of Cinderella and Snow White by hurling them into a science-fictional future. The urge to create narratives in order to make sense of reality is matched only by the need to escape reality by the same means.Īmid this abundance, fairy tales have found renewed popularity in recent years. They pour out of our screens and social-media feeds, our books, and, of course, ourselves. More than ever before, humans seem to be inundated with stories.

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