Sometimes the oldest and most familiar tales just need a new twist. Daniel Mallory Ortberg does that to the extreme, turning the familiar quite strange in The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror. In this collection of creepy short fiction, each story is based on a classic fairy tale, sometimes blended together with other fairy tales, pieces of Biblical text, or other familiar literary sources. But don’t get too comfortable. These aren’t your average fairy tale retellings.
The Merry Spinster contains eleven short stories, with the title story right at the center. At the end of the collection is a list of “sources and influences,” though most of these you will be able to pick up on as you go along. The overall tone of the collection is dark and surreal; don’t expect these fairy tales to end happily ever after. The happiest stories are from the point of view of murderers, while many of the others are from the perspective of someone being tormented by the friends and family members around them. But the most unsettling thing is the way that these stories seem unmoored from the world we live in. Ortberg’s fantasy worlds are strange and unfamiliar, using words in slightly different ways from what we’re used to. Particularly notable is the way that Ortberg plays with gender, pairing names, gendered terms (like “daughter”), and pronouns in unexpected combinations. You have to go into each story with an open mind, prepared to revise any assumptions you’ve started making along the way.
I think my favorite of the stories was the very first in the collection, “The Daughter Cells,” which was also one of few with a tradition plot arc. It’s a rather straightforward retelling of “The Little Mermaid” that follows the darker path presented in Hans Christian Anderson’s original tale, when the mermaid’s sisters bring her a knife that she can use to kill the prince, whose blood will transform her back into a creature of the sea. Ortberg’s mermaid is a flighty, shallow girl, obsessed with souls in the way that Disney’s Little Mermaid is obsessed with human trinkets. The romantic notion of the prince’s soul is what attracts her to him in the first place, and when she can’t get his soul through love, she thinks nothing of harvesting it from him by violence.
I also enjoyed “The Rabbit,” a seriously sinister retelling of Margery Williams children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit. The rabbit in this tale is obsessed with becoming Real in quite the same way that the mermaid in the earlier story is obsessed with gaining a soul. What starts off as a cute story from the perspective of a stuffed animal slowly dawns into horror as you realize that the rabbit intends to drain away the boy’s life force in its quest for Realness. The boy’s illness at the end of the story takes on a terrifying new meaning.
One of the most unusual stories is “Fear Not: An Incident Log,” which isn’t based on a fairy tale at all, but rather on the Book of Genesis. The narrator of the story, one of God’s angels, is presented as an underling in the great bureaucracy of heaven, trying to explain and defend several negative “incidents” that they were involved in. The story covers several events but focuses on the incident in which the angel wrestles with Jacob—which ends a bit differently than the version you may be used to.
The story I found most unsettling was “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” which turns “The Fisherman and His Wife” into a glaring tale of toxic friendship, complete with some serious gas lighting. “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Mr. Toad” takes on similar themes. I’ll take killer mermaids over manipulative “friends” any day.
If you want to read The Merry Spinster for yourself, you can find it at your local retailer or buy a copy online and support The Gothic Library in the process by clicking this Bookshop.org affiliate link. Be sure to share your thoughts with me in the comments, when you’re done!