Troll’s Eye View

And what, one might wonder, was the slight, pernicious habit that blemished my otherwise purely beneficent character?

To be brief, I kill and eat human babies.

‘Skin by Michael Cadnum, from Troll’s Eye View

Troll’s Eye View is a collection of stories revisiting well-known fairy tales–Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, Molly and the Giants–often from the villain’s point of view. It’s a mixed bag of stories: some are slightly skewed re-tellings, some are realistic stories informed by the themes and structures of fairy tales, and some are new tales that add meat to the well-gnawed bones. Some of the stories work well, others don’t quite gel, but in the main, this is a solid little collection.

Most of the contributors are from the world of young adult fantasy, and the collection is aimed at that audience: though often dark, the stories are not too dark, and certainly not as disturbing as Angela Carter’s tales. Ellen Datlow, the editor, has enlisted a few well-known authors, too. Peter Beagle contributes a Jack and the Beanstalk tale that sounds like the giant’s wife as imagined by Raymond Carver, and Kelly Link provides an affecting contemporary Cinderella populated only by step-siblings who are not quite evil and not quite good. The Beagle and Link stories are what will attract adult readers to this anthology, but there are actually better stories than theirs in the collection.

By far the most successful story is Catherynne Valente’s “A Delicate Architecture,” which nudges as close to Angela Carter’s grim fairy tale world as it can. It’s not a re-telling but a brand new fairy story, with a twist at the end in which the tale’s victim is revealed to be the villain of a classic tale. It will be hard to revisit that old story without feeling a touch of sympathy for its evil presence.