Little Red Riding Hood In The Big Bad City edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers
01/08/2004 . Source: Pauline Morgan 

pub: DAW. 312 page enlarged paperback. Price: $ 6.99 (US), $ 9.99 (CAN). ISBN: 0-7564-0223-6.

Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK.

check out website: www.dawbooks.com

In many ways, the title of this book is misleading. The premise behind the stories in this anthology is to take traditional fairy tales and re-tell them in a contemporary urban setting. In only two of the stories and, that by stretching the imagination, does Little Red Riding Hood appear.

This is partly because the innocence that she embodies is largely missing in the modern city and partly because the authors have interpreted their brief in a wide variety of imaginative ways.
In most of the stories, it is possible to follow the plot-line of the original and to enjoy the adaptations.

Largely, these are based on tales that are very familiar and that I recognise. For a few, it is a little harder to place the antecedents. Most of what we generally regard as fairy stories were actually traditional tales told to teach the listener and were thus passed from mother to daughter. In most cases, the integrity of the original is maintained in these interpretations.

Only once is the source material duplicated. Both 'Brownie Points' by Elizabeth Gilligan and 'Keeping It Real' by Jody Lynn Nye are based on 'The Elves And The Shoemaker'. They are very different takes on the theme. The premise is that the elves help out the overworked shoemaker but if payment is offered they will cease to help. The second of these stories sticks very closely to the original but setting it in a poor neighbourhood of the city. The first one starts with a long standing relationship between the shoemakers and the brownies but adds a modern twist by having an industrial dispute between them.

Some of the originals will be familiar from the days when all children were taken to the pantomime each Christmas. It is quite a jump from those cosy entertainments to meeting Peter Pan as a rent boy as we do in 'Panhandler' by Alan Dean Foster or Jack as a penniless musician sent out to sell his leather coat and coming back with, supposedly, magic guitar picks as in 'Jack And The B.S.' by Tanya Huff.

Puss in 'Puss In DC' by Pamela Sargent doesn't actually wear the boots but certainly guides his not-so-bright master through various pitfalls to achieve success.
'The Last Day Of The Rest Of Her Life' by Russell Davies is a re-telling of 'The Little Match Girl', but here the girl is out in the cold because she doesn't want to go home to her drug addict father. To keep warm in the snow, she uses the drugs she has been withholding from him.

Other familiar tales are based on Rumplestiltskin: 'If You Only Knew My Name' by David Niall Wilson) where a computer personality helps Cheryl solve programming problems; 'The Nightingale': 'The Nightingale' by Dena Bain Taylor where the songbird is a woman with an exceptional voice; The Little Dancer: 'After The Flowering' by Janet Berliner which is set at the end of the dancer's life and Beauty And The Beast: 'The Rose Garden' by Michelle West is the rehabilitation of a grumpy old man.

Two of the stories are based on more recent works but which have entered into the realm of the 'fairy tale' partly because of their familiarity and partly because they contain the same kind of warnings of those earlier traditional tales. 'Meet Mr. Hamlin' by Bill Willingham, as the title suggests, is a take on 'The Pied Piper Of Hamelin', a poem by Robert Browning, based on a purported series of events from 1284 AD. 'A Faust Films Production' by Janeen Webb being a re-telling of 'Dr Faustus', a play by Christopher Marlowe, one of Shakespeare's contemporaries, though the idea of the deal with the devil has long antecedents.

He probably based his work on the German play of a few years earlier telling the story of a historical character magician who died in 1538 and was supposed to have made a pact with the devil. Both stories still contain the warnings to be careful of what you wish for and to honour your agreements. This is not to dismiss these stories as they are clever reworkings, but to indicate the range of imagination of the authors in the volume.

For several of the stories, the excellent 'Mallificent' by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, 'Signs Are Hazy, Ask Again Later' by Fiona Patton and 'Exterminary' by Patricia Lee Macomber, I wasn't absolutely sure of the source material. This is more my unfamiliarity with the details of the originals rather than any fault of the authors.

Of the two remaining stories, 'Little Red In The Hood' by Irene Radford fits closest to the title of the volume but with twists. Red is not an innocent. She preys on wolves of the human kind. This a very dark story.

'Trading Fours With The Moldy Figs' by Jean Rabe stands out as being a very different interpretation of the original remit and an excuse to explore the music of New Orleans. The Moldy Figs are a jazz band in which the musicians are wolves, one of whom is Red Riding Hood's wolf. During the narrative, he explains how the misunderstanding occurred that lead him to being branded the bad guy. The newcomer to the group turns out to be the wolf that blew up the Three Little Pigs.

This is a volume well worth reading and shows the truth of the idea that there are a limited number of plots, but an unlimited number of ways in which they can be developed to make them fresh.

Pauline Morgan