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Red Riding Hood In The Big Bad City edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers check out website: www.dawbooks.com
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.
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. 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
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OTHER REVIEWS - August 2004
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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. 
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