Fairy Tales, Nursery Rhymes, and Children's Movies Aren't for the Faint of Heart

Fairy Tales, Nursery Rhymes, and Children’s Movies Aren’t for the Faint of Heart by Debra H. Goldstein

My daughter and son-in-law recently had a beautiful (okay, I’m partial) baby boy. While they were in the hospital, I was charged with caring for their almost three-year-old daughter, who loves to be read to and is just beginning to be interested in movies. What I rediscovered is that many fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and children’s movies aren’t for the faint of heart. A number of them are downright frightening.

 

For example, one of her favorite chapter books to be read to her contains stories of The Frog and The Toad. All seems pretty innocent between the two good friends as they help each other find a missing button or take care of each other when one feels ill, but there are also stories where the twist or final moral isn’t as kind. In Shivers, the Frog recounts an encounter he had as a child frog with the Old Dark Frog who eats little frog children for supper. The child being read to is left to decide if it happened or not. A calendar trick used in Spring teaches that a little deception can allow one to accomplish a goal.

 

Then, of course, there are those fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm. We think of them as children’s stories, but really they were adult versions with adult themes. For example, what is soothing about The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage? These three live together, each doing their own share of the tasks: the bird collects wood for the fire, the mouse brings in water, sets the table, and lights the fire, while the sausage keeps all three well fed. When the bird decides they should all switch jobs because the bird is doing more of the backbreaking work, the story ends with the sausage being eaten by a dog while going out to collect wood, the mouse imitating the way the sausage seasons food by throwing itself into the pot and dies, and the bird, while trying to fetch water, falls into the well and drowns. Not particularly comforting to an adult, let alone a child.

 

To this day, I can’t watch Bambi without having a panic attack when the fire kills Bambi’s mother. Similarly, the wicked witches and stepmothers in Cinderella, Snow White, and other stories/movies, don’t leave me with happy feelings.

 

Growing up, did a fairy tale, nursery rhyme, or children’s movie leave you scarred for life?

I HEART Short Stories by Kaye George

What’s not to like? They’re a fast read in a busy life, and they don’t take long to write. Okay, some writers find it hard to get a whole story concept into a limited word count, but I’m one of the many who prefer writing them. I like writing novels, too, but in more of a Dorothy Parker sense: I hate writing, I love having written.

One of the things I like about writing them most is the opportunity to stretch myself, experiment with different forms, genres, and points of view. I even wrote one in second person present tense once, just to see if I could do it. (“You Can Do the Math” in All Things Dark and Dastardly. I read a novel in third person once and would like to try a story that way, too, some day. I would never attempt a novel in either second singular or third plural!

I have exactly one werewolf story to my credit, but it won a prize at Mysterical-E (“Retransformation” Summer 2008). I’ve long wanted to use the character, Isabel Musik, again and hope another story with her will appear soon.

I’ve done two stories that are takeoffs on fairy tales and I’ve loved writing those. They’re probably actually fantasy, but I’ll admit I did commit murder in both of them. The first, “Henry, Gina, and the Gingerbread House,” came out in Grimm Tales in 2011. The stories here are meant to include crimes and they’re a delightful bunch of tales. Henry (Hansel) and Gina (Gretel) are, true to the original tale, motherless waifs who are persecuted by their wicked stepmother while their father is overseas in the service. The stepmother shoves them into a candy shop called The Gingerbread House to confess to shoplifting. They set up a deal to work off the money owed, but they end up indentured to the witch of a woman who owns the place. The kids make out all right in the end.

The second is my latest! I did a version of “Cinderella” using modern technology. I call it “Ella and the Ball” and it was published in Once Upon a Fact in May of this year. It was a lot of fun giving Ella (she hates the derisive nickname Cinder Ella that her ugly stepsisters use) a self-driving pumpkin-colored coach and a fairy godfather who delivers the gown and glass slippers by drone. I completely changed the ending. It’s still happy, but she doesn’t end up with the prince. He was a bit of a pompous ass.

I must point out the major drawback of writing short stories: the income. There’s almost none. They’re fun to write and fun to read, but there’s not much money in them. Anthologies contain stories by many authors and the proceeds are split among them so that they amount to a few dollars a month. A very few dollars. Recently some of us who put them together have decided to do something different with the royalties from the publishers: give them to charities.

The first Austin Mystery Writers anthology, Murder on Wheels, which I helped put together, decided to give the proceeds to the Austin area Meals on Wheels. Each story in that volume features a wheel in the plot, so that seemed like a good fit. The second volume from that group, Lone Star Lawless, is benefitting the Port Aransas (TX) library, which lost all of their books in a recent hurricane. Day of the Dark: Stories of Eclipse, which I put together, gives over 50% of the proceeds to Earth and Sky. I’m the contact point for all three of these, so I usually add a little to the donation when I send it in to the charity organization. It feels good to do that, a lot better than cashing a check for $0.26!

                                                                    

Links:

My collection, A Patchwork of Stories: https://www.amazon.com/PATCHWORK-STORIES-Kaye-George-ebook/dp/B0049B2C2A/

All Things Dark and Dastardly: https://www.amazon.com/Things-Dark-Dastardly-Mary-Loesch/dp/0984657800/

Grimm Tales: https://www.untreedreads.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=6_262&products_id=286

Once Upon a Fact: http://wildsidepress.com/authors-t/tomlinson-katherine/

Murder on Wheels: https://www.amazon.com/Murder-Wheels-Ramona-DeFelice-Long/dp/147940554X/

Lone Star Lawless: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1479429767/

Day of the Dark: Stories of Eclipse: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073YDGSL5/

BIO: Kaye George, national-bestselling, multiple-award-winning mystery author, writes five series: Imogene Duckworthy; Cressa Carraway Musical Mysteries; People of the Wind (Neanderthal), the upcoming Vintage Sweets series, and as Janet Cantrell, the Fat Cat cozy series.

You can find her short stories in anthologies and magazines, her collection, A Patchwork of Stories, and her own anthology of eclipse stories, Day Of The Dark, by Wildside Press, July 2017. Most recently, her stories have appeared in Lone Star Lawless and in Once Upon A Fact: Futuristic Fairy Tales. The proceeds from both of these go to charities, Lone Star Lawless to the Port Aransas Library, which lost everything in the last hurricane, and Once Upon A Fact to organizations supporting women in STEM fields. Her writing is sometimes dark, sometimes light. She reviews for Suspense Magazine and lives in Knoxville, TN.

She’s lived in several states, many of which, oddly enough, begin with the letter M. She’s been honored with three Agatha Award nominations and one Silver Falchion. Her blogs are TravelsWithKaye.blogspot.com and KillerCharacters.com. Her webpage is KayeGeorge.com.

Heart from morguefile.com

Dorothy Parker photo from Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ggbain-05631 (digital file from original neg.)

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time long, long ago, someone told a story while sitting around a fire. Of course, we have no idea exactly when story telling began or who that first story teller was. It doesn’t matter who the storyteller was, or who all the forgotten storytellers who followed were. It was an attempt to make sense of the world.

The beginning stories; myths, folktales and fairy tales, usually had elements of magic like dragons, wizards, witches, talking animals or magic objects like magic mirrors, a magic ring and even beans as in Jack in the Beanstalk. The number three was often important in those stories, too, like in The Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Three Wishes, and The Three Billy Goats Gruff to name a few. The number three carries on with three main characters; victim, villain and the hero who goes on a quest to save the victim or thwart the bad guy and often has to fulfill three challenges to reach his goal. The only heroine I can think of offhand in those early tales was Gretel in Hansel and Gretel, who killed the evil witch and saved Hansel.

Over the years the stories have been altered and changed, but many sill followed the same motif of good conquering evil with a happy ending as in The Chronicles of Narnia and The Harry Potter series. This is not true with more modern literary works, but it still holds true with most mysteries, albeit with an absence of magic except in some paranormal mysteries.

I have always enjoyed reading folktales and took a class in college about folktales. It was one of my favorite classes. Folk tales have been told all over the world. Much of the fairy tales originated in folk tales like Cinderella which comes from France as does Puss in Boots and  Beauty and the Beast and others. The Fisherman and his Wife, Little Red Riding Hood, and many, many others came from Germany. In North America there was People Who Could Fly, The Wonderful Tar Baby Story (Uncle Remus) and Paul Bunyan’s Cornstalk, and many more told by American Indians.

Some authors have picked up on the fairytale or folklore theme and altered them like Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and others written from the point of view of one of the characters from a fairytale. The same was done even earlier with children’s books like The True story of the 3 Little Pigs! By A. Wolf as told to Jon Scieszka. One of my favorite children’s picture books was An Undone Fairy Tale by Ian Lendler in which the princess locked in the tower by her wicked step-father in the end rescues Sir Wilber, who comes to rescue her. It’s a delightfully funny tale immensely enjoyed by all the classes I’ve read it to both in my own classes and in the many classes I substituted for later.

Because we live in a world often filled with violence, dishonesty, and unfairness, we still hope for the happy ever after ending portrayed in many fairy tales even though deep in our minds, we know it can’t always be that way. Of course, some fairy tales are cautionary tales like The Fisherman and His Wife or The Emperor’s New Clothes, but most mysteries, other than noir, and especially in cozies, do follow the fairy tale motif ending of: “and they lived happily ever after,” unless it’s part of a series where we’re only given hints that if we keep reading the series it eventually will be with a happy ever after ending.

Of course it’s rarely the same joyful tripping down the path of happiness we envisioned when Cinderella was romanced by the handsome Prince Charming, and they went off to live in his castle where her life then became perfect; no quarrels, no problems, no dirty diapers, no sickness, and all was love and laughter, Sigh.

No, mysteries are more realistic than that. However, we do have the same motif; victim, villain, and hero/heroine. The heroes or heroines may be flawed. In fact, that makes them more interesting if they are. The reader may not know who the villain of the story is in advance, but will follow with the hero/heroine’s quest to bring the villain to justice, trying to figure it out as they read along, either who the villain is or how the villain will be uncloaked. Usually the hero or heroine has a friend or sidekick, although not seven dwarfs like Cinderella had, but someone to bounce ideas off of and help them when necessary. There may not be a Cinderella ending, but it almost always brings satisfaction to the reader because justice, at least in mysteries is served. And that’s what makes mysteries so popular. It brings a sense of justice to the reader. At least it does until they pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV.

Do you like happy endings in your mysteries?

Do you like folk tales or Fairy Tales?