The surly pubescent Janice, sent to deliver dinner to her Nana, hangs around the A&W with her best frenemy, eyeing a boy who’s way out of her league. A directionless galoot, freshly come into a financial settlement from a childhood accident, tries to find the girl he hooked up with at a drunken celebration she left behind only a Lucite shoe. A brother and sister are sent to live with an unkind foster mother who locks them in the basement when she goes out.
The subject matter of all but the two final stories in this collection is utterly - you might even say rigorously - mundane. Writers with a yen for the Gothic or fabulist gravitated toward the fairy tale as an alternative literary heritage, far older than psychological realism and with its own set of aesthetics and rules.īy contrast, “The Witch” looks like an experiment in the opposite strategy. Carter and her literary descendants (it’s a daughter-heavy lineage) were mostly refugees from naturalism, the kitchen-sink school of narrative that predominated in mid- and late-20th-century fiction, and to which Thompson belongs. It’s unclear from reading “The Witch: And Other Tales Re-told” just how aware Jean Thompson is of this tradition. In the right light, “Pride and Prejudice” is a retelling of “Beauty and the Beast.” Those are just some of the more overt homages Western literature owes as much to fairy tales as it does to Greek myth and the Bible.
The great Angela Carter’s revelatory 1979 story collection, “The Bloody Chamber” - a brocaded work of heady sensuality, intelligence and violence - remains the benchmark, but Kate Bernheimer’s Fairy Tale Review and the several excellent Bernheimer-edited anthologies spun off from it carry the standard forward. The practice of retelling fairy tales in the form of literary fiction is, if not quite hallowed, certainly established.
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