Cover Penguin classics edition published in 2003 – the edition I own

(5) MARY SHELLEY –

FRANKENSTEIN (1818)

“It’s alive!”

Wikipedia proposes that “Frankenstein is one of the best-known works of English literature”. I don’t know – in my opinion, it is, and it isn’t.

It isn’t because much of Frankenstein in popular culture or imagination comes not from the novel but from its cinematic adaptations, particularly the 1931 film directed by James Whale, such as my opening quote and indeed the whole mechanics – or dare I say it, the ‘electrics’ – of the creation of the monster.

That creation isn’t really the primary source of horror in the novel, so the novel is somewhat vague about it and indeed mostly skips over it to get to the main point, the conflict between the monster and its creator – or rather, the horror of the creator at his creation (or creature).

So that whole process of the monster “as a composite of whole body parts grafted together from cadavers and reanimated by the use of electricity” is not so much in the novel. I seem to recall hints of electricity or ‘galvanism’ (albeit perhaps more as influences on the novel than in the novel itself) but the novel is understandably coy about the details of the monster’s animation or reanimation other than it being part of the discovery of a previously unknown scientific “elemental principle of life”. For that matter, there are definitely explicit references to alchemy and magic, but these are also explicitly dismissed as possible mechanics for the creation of the monster.

Not only does much of Frankenstein in popular culture or imagination originate from elsewhere than the novel, but there’s substantial parts of the novel that tend not to find their way into adaptations, let alone popular culture or imagination. There’s the whole focus on Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, which is also implausibly what the monster uses to learn to read – although that’s simply one part of the implausibly contrived way the monster learns language at all.

Speaking of allusions or references, most adaptations – and even contemporary editions of the book – tend to drop the Shelley’s subtitle and subtext, the modern Prometheus.

Or that the whole novel itself is epistolary, with the framing device that it is written as a letter by the captain of an Arctic discovery ship to his sister – who firstly recounts the surprisingly detailed tale told to him firstly by the Victor Frankenstein dying from exposure to the Arctic ice after being found by him or his crew, and secondly by the monster when the latter pops in for an epilogue. For that matter, this whole ending by icy showdown in the Arctic between the monster and his creator tends to be replaced in popular culture or imagination by the fiery end at the hands of the village mob from the 1931 film.

And yet on the other hand it is “one of the best-known works of English literature” because of that very influence within popular culture and imagination that has seen plot details from the novel displaced by its adaptations. After all, the details may differ but the core concept or premise, basic plot, and themes remain the same – “infused with elements of the Gothic novel and the Romantic movement, it has had a considerable influence on literature and on popular culture, spawning a complete genre of horror stories, films, and plays”.

Its influence is such that it is often argued to be the first work (or trope maker) of science fiction – such as by Brian Aldiss in his history of SF, Billion Year Spree.

Not bad for the first novel of a teenaged girl who wrote it in a private competition with the two leading poets of the day, her future husband (and then partner) Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, to see who could write the best ghost or horror story – and who clearly won, given the novel’s influence and adaptations. Interestingly, the runner-up was neither Percy Shelley nor Lord Byron, but fellow guest Jonn Polidori with the first published modern vampire story in English, “The Vampyre” (albeit working from a fragment of a story from Byron).

You probably know that Frankenstein is not the name of the monster but of his creator, Victor Frankenstein – the archetype of scientific hubris, or more proverbially, the mad scientist – although the two tend to be conflated in name.

You also probably know the basic premise and plot. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl – no, wait, I mean, boy makes monster, boy rejects monster, and it doesn’t end well from there. Actually, there’s also the traditional boy meets girl plot in there but that doesn’t end well either, thanks to the crossover with the boy makes monster plot – as well as the boy makes girl for monster and boy rejects making girl for monster plot.

One of the ambiguities of the novel is making the monster may not be so bad of itself, it’s that Victor is the archetypal deadbeat dad who skips out to the store for some cigarettes and never comes back, because he is so horrified by the monster’s appearance. Hey pal, you made it! Funny that its appearance never bothered you throughout the lengthy process of making it until after you brought it to life. Perhaps all the subsequent pain could have all been avoided if he had made his monster less, well, monstrous, and more, you know, attractive? You know, in the style of Rocky from Rocky Horror Picture Show – or for that matter, how the Bride of Frankenstein tends to be depicted in adaptations.

Anyway, after he is so superficially abandoned, the monster rises to his own villainy with a murderous rampage. Okay, so murderous rampage is something of an overstatement, since he kills one person, Victor’s brother, William (and an innocent servant girl is hanged for the crime). He approaches Victor in truce, seeking Victor create a female companion for him. Victor initially does so, then destroys her as he fears a race of monsters. (Really, Victor? Come on – show a little imagination, man. You could always create her without ovaries. Or make the monster a male companion). The monster renews his rampage with a vengeance, or more vengeance anyway – killing Victor’s close friend and then Victor’s bride Elizabeth. In her bed on their wedding night – admittedly a nice villainous touch. Victor’s father dies of grief, as was the fashion at that time. Victor then pursues the monster to the Arctic for his own vengeance but fails miserably and freezes instead. The monster then mourns his creator, perhaps because he realizes he will now have nothing to do, and vows to destroy himself.

Thus, the monster wastes his potential as a Romantic Age Hulk. His character is somewhat different from his iconic film appearance, not least because he is sensitive and emotional – like an emo Hulk without the smashing. He is also highly articulate and literate, indeed having read Paradise Lost – clearly no good could come of that. Even so, he is as iconic as his creator – an enduring influence in theme, when not directly adapted in name or image. In his personal study of horror, Danse Macabre, Stephen King considered Frankenstein’s monster (along with Dracula and the Werewolf) to be an archetype of numerous horror figures in fiction, in a role he referred to as “The Thing Without a Name”.

RATING:

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Apparently, not one but two films were adapted from Leiber’s short story – one in 1967 and one in 1995, with this as the poster for the latter. I’ve never seen it so I don’t know if it’s any good or lives up to its blurb as the best horror film of the year. I suspect not.

(4) FRITZ LEIBER –

“THE GIRL WITH THE HUNGRY EYES” (1949)

Fritz Leiber rocked my fantasy world, as he did the world of literary fantasy in general, even if he is sadly overlooked in the genre now. I guess that’s the fate of most fantasy writers that aren’t the current thing or aren’t named Tolkien. There’s also Leiber’s love of cats, chess, and theater – which are all fun to see pop up in his stories like playing the fantasy nerd equivalent of a drinking game.

Anyway, there simply is too much Leiber to choose from for its influence on me or the genre. There’s his novels, of which the standout is The Big Time – an SF novel of time war, as in two sides fighting a mysterious cosmic war against each other across time and space by changing history on each other (or the Change War as they call it). It’s even more intriguing as much of the vast cosmic backstory is only dropped in hints or remains mysterious (even when Leiber set a few other stories in the same universe). Indeed, the entire novel is set in a kind of cosmic waystation (in the titular Big Time, outside Little Time or the space time of our universe constantly being changed by the war), once again evoking Leiber’s love of theater both in the story (as the waystation is for rest and relaxation) and for the story itself as it is easy to imagine it as a stageplay. It is strikingly multi-layered, as the story extends through time and space as a cosmic backdrop yet effectively takes place entirely within the one “room”, albeit a room somewhat like the Tardis.

However, it’s his stories that effectively made his reputation as well as his influence for me or the genre – stories that largely created or inspired at least two sub-genres of fantasy. There’s his most famous creations, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, an adventuring duo of unlikely heroes in the world of Newhon (or “no when” backwards) and the city of Lankhmar – defining many of the tropes of the so-called sword-and-sorcery or heroic fantasy subgenre. However, it is his short stories that largely created or inspired the genre of contemporary fantasy – that is, adapting fantary or horror tropes to the setting of our contemporary or modern world.

It was a close call for this entry with my runner-up story – “The Man Who Never Grew Young”. This story is not so much contemporary fantasy but a parable all of its own, although not unlike the time changing science fiction of The Big Time – the narrator lives in a world recognizably our own, but one in which history and time are now running in reverse, such that people do indeed grow younger, “born” into existence from the grave and ultimately going back to the womb before disappearing into time. Although as the title suggests, the narrator himself is mysteriously unaffected by this part of the time reversal – never growing younger although history is still going backwards all around him. I particularly like the hints, at least in my perception, that this has come about from some terrible weapon deployed in a war in the future – which has of course become the distant past to the narrator – such that time itself was broken and reversed.

However, I have to give this special mention entry to the story that has remained and resonated with me ever since I read it – which definitely is one of his stories of contemporary fantasy – and that is his modern vampire story with a twist, “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”.

“She’s the smile that tricks you into throwing away your money and your life. She’s the eyes that lead you on and on, and then show you death. She’s the creature you give everything you’ve got and gives nothing in return. When you yearn towards her face on the billboards, remember that. She’s the lure. She’s the bait. She’s the Girl”.

RATING:

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The map of Fantasyland in the book and also part of the satirical deconstruction of fantasy tropes. It may also look oddly familiar

(3) DIANA WYNNE JONES –

THE TOUGH GUIDE TO FANTASYLAND (1996)

Following on from Dungeons & Dragons and the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, this is the third of my top three or god-tier entries that are all effectively encyclopedic reference works for the genre of fantasy, whether informally as for the rulebooks of Dungeons & Dragons or formally as for the Encyclopedia of Fantasy. The Tough Guide to Fantasyland leans more to the formal reference work of the latter arranged in alphabetical order, but with a twist – its meta-fictional premise that it is a tour guide to “Fantasyland” as the generic setting of pretty much all fantasy. The creators of fantasy stories are the “Management” of Fantasyland and their stories are “tours” for their audiences, so the book is in the style of a tourist guidebook, albeit a fictional parodic one – hence the title, adapted from the popular Rough Guide series of tourist guidebooks at the time.

The end result is a Devil’s Dictionary deconstructing the tropes or cliches of the fantasy genre – such as entry on elves, which has lodged itself deep in my psyche ever since such that I have never quite been able to look at the elves in The Lord of the Rings the same way again.

“Elves appear to have deteriorated generally since the coming of humans. If you meet Elves, expect to have to listen for hours while they tell you about this – many Elves are great bores on the subject – and about what glories there were in ancient days. They will intersperse their account with nostalgic ditties (songs of aching beauty) and conclude by telling you how great numbers of Elves have become so wearied with the thinning of the old golden wonders that they have all departed, departed into the West. This is correct, provided you take it with the understanding that Elves do not say anything quite straight. Many Elves have indeed gone west, to Minnesota and thence to California, and finally to Arizona, where they have great fun wearing punk clothes and riding motorbikes”.

RATING: 5 STARS*****

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St Martin’s Press, hardcover 1997 edition – the edition I own

(2) JOHN CLUTE & JOHN GRANT –
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FANTASY

The best single reference work concerning fantasy fiction in all media – even better now that it is online, although sadly, not updated like its companion and predecessor The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

However, that it is not updated does not detract from its greatest strength as a reference work and influence on me personally, which is not so much its entries for individual authors or works, but its compilation of fantasy themes and tropes, including its classification of fantasy subgenres. Many of these are compiled as entries under an evocative or striking phrase, many of which in turn were invented by the editors – one notable example being ‘thinning’, for the gradual loss of magic or vitality from the world.

Others include the descriptive term for one of my favorite subgenres of fantasy – posthumous fantasy, a fantasy set in the afterlife. The latter is more usually styled as Bangsian fantasy, named for John Kendricks Bangs who arguably codified or pioneered it as a modern fantasy subgenre – but often leads to confusion with its more conventional use for fiction or in this case fantasy published after an author’s death when I casually use the term posthumous fantasy elsewhere.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
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Cover – Conan the Barbarian #1 comic (October 1970), by Barry Smith and John Verpoorten, also used as the cover of the original comics omnibus Volume 1 published by Titan Books in February 2025 (fair use). Note once again the classic Conan pose

TOP 10 FANTASY BOOKS

(SPECIAL MENTION: CULT & PULP)

I’ve ranked my Top 10 Fantasy Books but fantasy is too prolific – and phantasmagorical – a genre to be confined to a mere top ten books or even my usual list of special mentions.

Instead, I have two lists of special mentions – one classic and the other cult and pulp.

This is obviously the latter – for those fantasy books or works that don’t quite that iconic status or recognition within popular culture and imagination of my classic special mentions but I like them anyway!

That or they’re an enduring influence on me despite (or perhaps because of) their “cult & pulp” status.

Cover Penguin Classics paperback edition 2003

(4) BRAM STOKER –

DRACULA (1897)

Dracula is THE vampire, synonymous with vampires and vampirism in popular culture and imagination.

My love of vampire fiction – in literature, in film or television, in comics and in every other media in which vampires appear – originates directly from Dracula, as I read it in early childhood. It may be tame by standards of modern cinematic horror, particularly given its style as an epistolary novel, but it literally gave me nightmares as a child. Of course, it probably didn’t help that I read it when I was home from school sick with fever – and I still remember it in terms of fever dream.

There is a whole host of vampiric or ‘vampire adjacent’ beings or creatures in folklore and mythology, going all around the world and back to the dawn of history or beyond, as well as an incredible dense “folklore for the entity known today as the vampire” that “originates almost exclusively from early 18th-century southeastern Europe”.

And yet almost all of it pales (heh) in comparison to the archetype of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which effectively supersedes its predecessors in folklore, except to the extent it adapted them – and even then most people remember it by Dracula rather than the original folklore.

Vampires tend to be superpowered by nature and Dracula even more so, as his book codified the definitive vampire tropes in fiction. In adaptations, he has also been freakishly hard to kill, at least permanently. He can shift shape, most impressively into mist or dust in moonlight – passing through the smallest cracks and virtually teleporting. He can also command animals – and the elements. In short, he was potentially a Dark Lord to rival Sauron – indeed, it wouldn’t be too hard to recast Dracula as The Lord of the Rings, substituting Transylvania for Mordor and the Brides for the Black Riders (only much s€xier). Kim Newman did something of the sort with his Anno Dracula series, where Dracula bests Van Helsing and vampirizes Queen Victoria to rule the British Empire. Or at least, he might have done if he’d had any sort of plan in Stoker’s book beyond picking up British chicks – but then that’s just how he swings, baby.

Speaking of the Brides, they’re never referred to as such or the Brides of Dracula in the novel itself – that came later in other media and popular culture – but instead are referred to as the sisters. Nor are they portrayed as married to him or in any other relationship to him – their names as well as “the origin and identity of the Sisters, as well as the true nature of their relationship with Count Dracula, is never revealed”.

They were, however, written as hot, and they have been portrayed that way ever since in imitations or adaptations, something they use to bewitch their victims such as Jonathan Harker or those who seek to stake them such as Abraham van Helsing, albeit both narrowly survive or resist their bewitchment. One wonders why Dracula even leaves his castle at all, let alone for England, when he could just hang with the Brides – although in fairness it seems that his grand plan in England was to replicate the Brides. It amuses me that Dracula’s supernatural invasion of England ultimately involved not much else.

“Dracula is one of the most famous works of English literature and has been called the centrepiece of vampire fiction…the novel has been adapted many times. Count Dracula has deeply influenced the popular conception of vampires; with over 700 appearances across virtually all forms of media, the Guiness Book of World Records named Dracula the most portrayed literary character.”

And then you have all the themes, above and below the surface. I’ve already referred to Dracula’s supernatural invasion of England – which sees Dracula as an example of the invasion literature at the time, albeit the latter tended towards more mortal and mundane enemies. Dracula’s invasion also bears parallels to disease or plague – something made more explicit in the various films of Nosferatu, which was essentially Dracula with the serial numbers filed off. Throw in ethnicity (including Stoker’s Irish nationality), sexuality, religion or superstition, and science – and now we’re just getting started.

As I said in my previous special mention for Alice, Dracula’s dark fantasy or horror arguably dovetails with my definition of the modern fantasy genre as a fusion of fairy tale and Cthulhu mythos, with Dracula obviously towards the Cthulhu Mythos end of that fusion.

Indeed, one could propose a parallel definition of the modern fantasy genre as a fusion of Alice and Dracula, the former parallel to fairy tale and the latter parallel to the Cthulhu Mythos.

RATING: 5 STARS*****

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Cover of The Annotated Alice, combining both books, Penguin 2001 (the edition I own)

(3) LEWIS CARROLL –

ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND / THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (1865 / 1871)

“Curiouser and curiouser”…

Few fantasies are as iconic as Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass (although the two books are often merged in popular culture) – which for simplicity I’ll conflate with their protagonist, Alice.

Through the vivid imagery or encounters of her adventures, as well as their potential symbolic allusions, Alice has lent herself readily to adaptation and popular imagination.

Allusions to Alice have earned their own trope on TV Tropes, which notes that the original novels can be associated with surreal or psychedelic fantasy, drug imagery (as in Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit), gothic horror and other aspects of Victorian England, such as steampunk.

As TV Tropes notes, “the name ‘Alice’, when used in a reference to Alice in Wonderland, therefore tends to be used for fantastical, ethereal characters or concepts, and that goes double if her last name is a variation on Carroll” (or Liddell – but more about that later). Other frequent references include white rabbits or going down the rabbit hole (as in The Matrix) – into a world of the hero’s journey that doesn’t conform to real world logic (and in which our heroine has to use intuition, a good heart, and an ability to acquire allies).

Not to mention white rabbits, cats and tea parties – or Mad Hatters. While we’re here, I should also note cards and chess as the premise for each of the settings in Wonderland and beyond the looking-glass respectively.

As for Alice herself, Lewis Carroll described her (when writing on her personality in “Alice on the Stage”) as “wildly curious, and with the eager enjoyment of Life that comes only in the happy hours of childhood, when all is new and fair, and when Sin and Sorrow are but names — empty words signifying nothing!”. I can’t think of a better – or more endearing – description than that.

For Carroll, there was, at least to some extent, a real Alice – Alice Pleasance Liddell, who inspired Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, when she asked Carroll to tell her a story on a boating trip in Oxford. The extent to which his character can be identified with Alice Liddell is not clear (and the brunette Liddell certainly did not resemble the blonde illustrations in the original book by cartoonist Sir John Tenniel). However, there are direct links to Liddell in the books – they are set on her birthday and her half birthday six months later (with the corresponding age), they are dedicated to her and the letters of her name are featured in an acrostic poem in the sequel.

As Catherine Robson wrote in Men in Wonderland – “In all her different and associated forms—underground and through the looking glass, textual and visual, drawn and photographed, as Carroll’s brunette or Tenniel’s blonde or Disney’s prim miss…in novel, poem, satire, play, film, cartoon, newspaper, magazine, album cover or song—Alice is the ultimate cultural icon, available for any and every form of manipulation, and as ubiquitous today as in the era of her first appearance.”

Alice’s fantasy adventures arguably dovetail with my definition of the modern fantasy genre as a fusion of fairy tale and Cthulhu mythos, with Alice obviously towards the fairy tale end of that fusion – albeit Alice extends beyond fairy tale to logical and linguistic paradoxes, play, pun, and parodies. Although it is tempting to imagine an adaptation of Alice more towards the Cthulhu mythos end – some of the beings and realms she encounters in her adventures come close…

Indeed, I would also propose a parallel definition of the modern fantasy genre as a fusion of Alice and my next special mention entry.

RATING: 5 STARS*****

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Cover Barnes & Noble Collectible Classics: Omnibus Edition, hardcover 2016

(2) H.P. LOVECRAFT – CHTHULU MYTHOS

Does any other literary fantasy or SF mythology have the pre-eminence, or even more so capture the paranoid modern zeitgeist, as Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos?

Lovecraft took the worldview of modern science and turned it into a source of cosmic horror, creating that genre of fantasy or SF horror.

“His famous cosmology, created almost single-handedly, did not celebrate science and progress, but was instead full of otherworldly monsters and blind, raving deities…all of his work resonates with the terror of the newly-discovered magnitude of the universe…Einstein’s theory of relativity opened a door into teleportation, time travel, and alien geometry, and radically altered peoples’ notion of space-time itself, while the discovery of pre-Cambrian fossils and Wegener’s then-new-and-controversial hypothesis of continental drift brought the notion that the Earth was far older than previously believed…All of this was subtly addressed in Lovecraft’s stories of alien horror, and of the remains of ancient civilizations lost to the abyss of geological deep time”.

Our science and technology are but a candle held up to the storm – worse, as developed by writers using the Cthulhu Mythos such as Charles Stross, they may actually draw the notice of entities that were best left not noticing us (and tend to drive us mad if we notice them). Or, as Stross observed elsewhere, it was a potent metaphor for such terrors as Cold War fears of nuclear warfare – as almost otherworldly forces of destruction lurking beneath the surface ready to be unleashed by unfeeling beings.

Although in fairness, Cthulhu is taken out by a steamship to his head in his original appearance in The Call of Cthulhu. Try doing that with pre-industrial technology.

TV Tropes observes how Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is an inversion of the philosopher Leibniz’s optimism “that the entire world could be described by reason, and that this is the best of all possible worlds”. For Lovecraft, “each new discovery only increased humanity’s knowledge of its own ignorance and insignificance, encouraging a nihilistic atmosphere, and this is perhaps the central theme of Lovecraft’s incisive fiction”. Interestingly that same comparison between Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds” and Lovecraft’s horror in James Morrow’s Blameless in Abaddon.

Lovecraft didn’t coin the term Cthulhu Mythos for his mythology – for that matter, I’m not sure how consistent or systematic his mythology was throughout his works. He was all about the vibe of it, with details changing between individual works. However, aptly enough, his creation had a life of its own, as developed and used by other writers, as encouraged by Lovecraft himself.

TV Tropes stated the premise of the Cthulhu Mythos best – “Humanity exists within a small flickering firelight of sanity and reason in a cold and utterly senseless universe full of ancient and terrible things with tentacles and too many eyes. Our science doesn’t properly describe the workings of the universe – ignorance really is bliss because even trying to understand the horrid truth of reality will surely drive you to madness. Our planet was owned by all manner of unknowable alien beings long before we crawled out of the primordial muck, and guess what? They want it back, which means doing a little pest control…”

It is for this mythology that Lovecraft ranks the second top spot of my special mentions – and more generally that he is “is considered perhaps both the greatest and most notorious of all American horror fiction writers, rivalled only by his idol Edgar Allan Poe”.

Fortunately, his mythology transcends Lovecraft himself, as there’s the matter of that notoriety – which remains for somewhat problematic reasons. There’s also the quality of his writing, with the style or execution of his prose often falling short of the dark grandeur of his cosmic horror – Lovecraft was notorious for his purple prose, and enthusiasm for more archaic expressions such as eldritch.

And then there is the fact that “much of his work is informed by a powerful fear and disgust for anything outside the limited sphere of an urban White Anglo-Saxon Protestant of his time” – or more bluntly, he “was “afraid of everything that wasn’t his home town of Providence, Rhode Island”.

Even so, his Cthulhu Mythos remains definitive for me of fantasy in general. As I noted in my previous entry, if I was to simply fantasy down to just two elements, it would be a fusion of fairy tale and the Cthulhu Mythos. Come to think of it, that’s not a bad description or tagline for The Lord of the Rings – fairy tale meets Cthulhu Mythos. If only Tolkien had written that essay…

RATING: 5 STARS*****

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Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in the Forest – painting by Carl Larsson in 1881, profile image of Wikipedia “Fairy Tale” (public domain image)

(1) FAIRY TALES

“Fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already because it is in the world already…What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of (evil). The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St George to kill the dragon” – G.K. Chesterton

Unfortunately, the term fairy tale tends to be used dismissively for stories only for children – although the best children’s literature arguably speaks to all ages – or even pejoratively for obvious fanciful falsehoods or “happily ever after” wishful thinking.

To that, one could argue that such preconceptions don’t even apply to those stories commonly called fairy tales, except in their modern incarnations, particularly their modern cinematic and television adaptations. Perhaps such preconceptions might be avoided by one of their alternative names – of which my favorites are wonder tales or the German term marchen – but the term fairy tale is too deeply ingrained in popular consciousness or imagination.

Whatever the name, a fairy tale is a “short story that belongs to the folklore genre” or a “specific type” of fantastic folktale. Ironically, not many fairy tales actually feature fairies – the fairy in the name of fairy tale refers more to fairy as a place or setting, the fairy lands or otherworlds of folklore and mythology but taking on a more generic meaning as a place of magic. Such stories do indeed typically feature magic and enchantments as well as “mythical or fanciful beings”, fairies or otherwise, although some stories such as Bluebeard don’t have any explicit magic or supernatural elements.

“Fairy tales were originally intended for all ages, but for a long period of time, they were only written or presented as children’s stories”, particularly in their cinematic adaptations by Disney. Many fairy tales were extraordinarily dark in their original form – some to the point of verging on horror – and some remain so in their modern versions, even if only by way of lingering hints or subtext. Ironically again, there is a countervailing trend within popular culture to revert fairy tales to their darker and edgier roots – or to subvert them as more adult deconstructions (or reconstructions), as well as parodies or satires (or the trope of “fractured fairy tales”).

The demarcation between fairy tales and legends or fables can be fuzzy. Fairy tales tend to be distinguished from legends by some degree of belief in historicity or veracity for their events, location or people. By contrast, fairy tales tend to be more timeless – “once upon a time” – and set in their own space distinct from our own world. Fables tend to focus more on the moral of a story as their definitive element.

“Fairy tales are found in cultures all over the world” and with “widespread variants”, but “only a tiny handful of them are widely known in modern culture”. They have a span to match their geographic scale – “many of today’s fairy tales have evolved from centuries-old stories that have appeared with variations, in multiple cultures around the world”. Fairy tales in literary form are relatively modern, mostly evolving from their predecessors in oral form or tradition. This makes “the history of the fairy tale…particularly difficult to trace because often only the literary forms survive”, but even so some fairy tales may date back thousands of years to the Bronze Age or the beginnings of civilization and writing itself.

“What fairy tales do share is a distinct and consistent set of narrative conventions. They usually take place “once upon a time”, in a setting that’s familiar but usually broadly generic, with few (if any) references to real people, places or events…typically told in an extremely spare and laconic style, using archetypical characters and locations”. That style was cited by Italo Calvino as a prime example of “quickness” in literature.

JRR Tolkien famously used the term for literary fantasy, including his own, in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” – an essay well worth reading for its philosophy of literary fantasy and Tolkien’s own writing. Like others who have pointed out that even traditional fairy tales tended not to involve fairies as such, Tolkien defined fairy tales as “stories about the adventures of men in Faerie, the land of fairies, fairytale princes and princesses, dwarves, elves, and not only magical species but many other marvels”. However, by either definition of fairy tale, it is worth remembering that Tolkien’s definitive literary fantasy, “The Lord of the Rings” (and even more so “The Hobbit”), would qualify as (extended) fairy tales – with elves, dwarves, goblins and trolls that have all been regarded as types of fairies.

Indeed, fairy tales remain definitive for me of fantasy in general – if I were to simplify fantasy or at least my tastes in it down to just two elements, it would be as a fusion of fairy tales and my next special mention entry.

RATING: 5 STARS*****

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