Fairy tales have been changed over the decades. As bedtime stories for young children, much of the original story has been taken out or toned down to illicit pleasant dreams rather than horrifying nightmares. With the dawning of the Disney age, anything even slightly grotesque was replaced with dancing mice, singing teapots, and happy endings to leave the kiddies (and the adults) with a warm fuzzy feeling.
“Grimm’s Grimmest” doesn’t just add the spice we’ve only heard about back into the fairy tales. It goes beyond the lost parts of “Snow White” and “Cinderella.” By now, most adults know of the Wicked Stepmother dancing in scalding iron shoes, or the fact that to fit their feet into the slipper, the stepsisters sliced off an end of their foot. While it may have seemed scandalous at one point, small things like that have failed to really turn fairy tales we grew up into horror stories.
In this installment of stories written by the Brothers Grimm, the true horror of the original stories comes out in full force as the adult world is treating to a collection of fairy tales that trade out mermaids and fairy godmothers for cannibalism, murder, and incest. Instead of the evil stepmother sending her unwanted children into the woods, she lops their heads off and cooks them up in stew. For one princess, the king that wants to marry her isn’t just twice her age…he’s also her father.
Not all of the stories read like a modern day horror. “The Death of the Little Hen” has a tragic ending, but not a bloody one. And “Prudent Hans” is simply the tale of an idiot who loses the girl in the end due to his stupidity. Others, however, push the limits of disturbing and gory. In “Fowler’s Fowl”, we are treated to a sorcerer who keeps the severed limbs of his victims in a basin full of blood. Cannibalism shows up several times, including in “The Robber Bridegroom” where a young bride watches as her future husband and his co-horts chop and eat another young woman.
While these aren’t the sort of stories you’ll want to read to small children, you can easily enjoy them if you remember that they come from a time period where great literature was nothing more than the passing of a tale to teach a lesson. You won’t find the written genius of modern greats like Stephen King or Dean Koontz in these pages. What you will find is the straightforward tales as only the Grimm brothers can tell them. With content that was created years before the rise of the slasher film, these stories are told with a simple charm and an adult twist that will keep you reading to the very last one.
