This is not a book for children, even though it I picked it off the YA shelf. It’s a part of the trend in YA lit, movies, tv shows, etc., to use fairy tales as part of the plot. A lot of the familiar conventions are present: wolves lurking in the woods, brave knights, trolls under bridges, but the familiar tales are revised to make them more into a nightmare of a fairy tale. The story begins sadly with the death of a young boy’s mother, and just keeps getting darker and more frightening. Connolly graphically describes decaying bodies, attacks by wolves, impaled heads, and severed hands and appendages, to name just a few of the nightmarish details.
The plot follows a typical coming of age tale: a young boy’s mother dies, so his father remarries and has a new baby. First son thinks stepmother is wicked and fears that father’s love is lost, and can’t get over the loss of his mother. A Trickster begins to lurk in the shadows, and one day the boy is pulled into fairytale land, but this land is bleak, in perpetual twilight, and peopled by some of the scariest villains I’ve ever encountered. Connolly seems to be able to combine some of the worst fears of childhood into beasts that surpass the usual witches and demons: wolves that are part human, a huntress who cuts up children and animals and then combines them together to make new prey to hunt, a monster that splits open and disgorges maggot-like offspring, a cannibalistic, bloated Snow White. Hints are dropped about bestiality, incest and pederasty. The boy’s protector is a gay knight who disparages religious faith and leads him into a sorceress’s castle where he thinks he finds his mother, but ends up having to fight this whirling eyed, fanged sorceress in a battle described in horrific detail.
I remember reading those English fairy tales about babies being eaten and giants being cut in half and the heads of fair maidens hanging by their hair. But Connolly seems to take the gore a step further. Yet I couldn’t stop reading. I kept thinking that soon I would get to the redemptive ending part. And the book does end with the boy making all the right choices in order to vanquish evil. Although he has lost his innocence, he returns home with a greater empathy for his parents and with a mature acceptance of his place in the world, despite some foreknowledge of more sorrows to come. All the scary things were in some way related to his fears about being unloved and left out and about the war. The ending leaves open the reality of the fairy tale land, with a strong suggestion that it exists only in the boy’s subconscious mind, but Connolly also makes it seem just real enough that a kid reading this book would be so drawn in by the vividness of Connolly’s descriptions to believe in it.
Although I objected to the content of this book on a number of levels, especially as a book for young readers, there’s just enough of interest in it to prevent me from just throwing it in the trash. While reading, I questioned whether I should finish; after reading, I questioned what kept me reading. What is it about scary stories? Is it the need for catharsis? The need to witness a hero vanquishing the dark? I read a couple Stephen King books as a teenager and still remember the grip of fear that compelled me to keep reading until the end, even though I felt like I had to read them on the sly – another reason to feel fearful.
Connolly does write with talent, although some of the horror feels forced; he picks up on things that make kids squirm, like suggestions about their parents’ love lives, about betraying their siblings, about the possibility of the imaginary world bleeding into the real, shadow people lurking in dark corners. These things make me squirm. And what makes me squirm more is trying to hate this book that has so much ugliness but also some truth, so that I might have to go back to it again to nail down what to think about it. Or I could just be content with the dichotomies, and accept the contradictory feelings this book draws out.
