Angela Slatter and GennaRose Nethercott have both written fairy tale and fairy-tale-adjacent novels and short stories. I asked them to chat with me, and each other, about those choices and why authors and readers enjoy them and the tropes being explored.
You are both clearly interested in fairy tales and folk tales, broadly understood, and use ideas and themes from them (as well as specific characters) in your work. What do you think gives such tales cultural endurance and resonance?
Angela: For me it starts with my memories of my mother telling me stories as a kid, bedtime reading was frequently Grimms’ fairy tales and Hans Christian Anderson’s works, as well as books of myths and legend. So that kind of created a rich treasury of stories in my mind and I still draw on those things today, and all the weird ideas that have percolated there in the years since.
I also that in general these are our earliest tales, they are sometimes bedtime stories, but also warning tales – don’t wander off in or the bogeyman will get you – and they are versions of the same tale across cultures, for examples Rhodopis is seen as a Greek/Egyptian version of Cinderella; Ye Xian is a Chinese version of Cinderella. The tales don’t exactly marry up but they have echoes of one another and I like the idea that stories travel. In travelling, they change and adapt to the country and also their tellers – we know our own audiences best and so we add our own spin on a story. They are so adaptable and that is a process that reaches across time, which I love. The version of Little Red Riding Hood my grandmother was told, and then told, differs to the one my mother told me and that I have then written and re-written, but there’s a wonderful sense of being a link in a chain and using the story as one needs to.
GennaRose: Yes, absolutely - their ability to shift, to transmute and reform to each new teller, each new culture who adopts them. I think of fairytales almost as living things–with this Darwinian urge to adapt to their environments to ensure their survival. If part of a story starts to feel too antiquated, it will become vestigial or fall off the tale entirely. And so too will new elements appear. Which, from a writing perspective, is incredibly handy–because you’re drawing from source material that has, over thousands of years, proven itself to be perfectly squishy and malleable.
I really come to these folktales from an ethnology background–so ultimately, an obsession not even with the tales themselves as much as the question of why we tell them; what do the stories say about us? After all, a story is a mirror. They can’t help but stay relevant.
Fairy tales in particular have, stereotypically, been regarded as having some sort of moral centre - Good and Bad characters and intentions are (usually) obvious. This is something that you both deal with in your fiction - often playing with who gets to be seen as ‘bad’ or ‘good’ and what those terms even mean. How do you think ideas of good and bad work, or function, in the 21st century?
Angela: I think for myself I’m trying to work on ideas of good and bad in terms of what’s harmful to whom. I also try and interrogate whether something that’s been traditionally called “bad” is actually bad or an inconvenience for a group with power. For instance, is the witch in the woods always bad? Is the childless woman actually bad? Or is it that both of those figures are actually powerful because they’re not weighed down by children and a home and husband to care for – they can think about themselves. That gets called “selfish” and selfishness is automatically coded as “bad”, but is it really? It’s dangerous to patriarchy because these are women who put themselves first rather than propping up a dying system of oppression.
I’m also really interested in ideas of redemption – what might you do that’s morally compromised (not “moral” in a Christian sense, but in a humanitarian sense), and what might it then cost you to find redemption in terms of your own karma. What might be forgivable, what might be unforgiveable. I also think that the moral aspect of fairy tales has come in with the Grimms and Perrault’s writings and re-workings. I think the original oral versions were more on the side of “Here’s a warning tale: if you walk in the woods, you might be eaten by a wolf, whether you’re a girl or a boy.”
GennaRose: Totally, I think many people don’t realize that when these tales that started in the oral tradition were captured by scholars and transcribed into the literate, it was those scholars who smacked pat, moralistic endings onto them. The originals are far more ambiguous and opaque. But the collectors had political agendas, and used fairytales as a way to push that agenda forward. The Grimm brothers, for example, were wielding the stories they selected and retold as tools of German nationalism.
Stories are always political. It’s important to remember that a story is never just a story. If it’s being told, it’s being told for a reason. And when that telling presents some characters as monsters or villains and others as sympathetic heroes, you have to ask: why? Who is this characterization serving?
I’m personally fascinated by monstrosity, by who is labeled monstrous. In folklore, monsters are always metaphors. And sure, sometimes that metaphor is harmless–like a boogeyman to dissuade children from wandering into dangerous woods–but often, that metaphor is used to ostracize a person or group of people. What scholar Alan Dundes referred to as “evil folklore” – folklore intended to enforce racial, religious, or gendered oppression. Women with medicinal knowledge become witches. Jews become blood libelous vampires, drinking children's blood. People with congenital disorders become terrible changelings. As we well know, the fastest way to get a populace to turn on a group of people is to convince them that those people aren’t human. And what’s one step further than inhuman? Why, monstrous.
So as for how these tools function now, in the 21st century: as more historically oppressed writers manage to break through into publishing, we’re seeing a reclamation of the villainous. Flipping the script and making the reader question why, exactly, these monsters were seen as monstrous to begin with. Old stories, seen from new angles.
You’ve both written fairy tale-ish stories: stories that feel like fairy tales, feel like they should be familiar, but don’t specifically name Rapunzel or Cinderella or someone else the reader might recognise. What is it that gives stories that sense, do you think - is it characters or setting or something else?
GennaRose: If you want to go down a hell of a rabbit hole, look up a little something called the ATU index. Essentially, it’s a massive catalogue of folktale types, first compiled in 1910 and tinkered with into the 2000s. Think: the original TV Tropes. With the ATU, you can look up, say, “ATU 425: The Animal as Bridegroom ” – which will give you every story in which this narrative appears, from the French “Beauty and the Beast,” to the Swedish “Prince Hat under the Ground,” and beyond. Then there are individual motifs often found within that category: “S241. Child unwittingly promised: first thing you meet," or “D150. Transformation: man to bird.”
It’s these–a defined set of motifs–that make a fairytale feel like a fairytale. To write an original story that feels fairytale-esque, you simply need to pluck from these building blocks.
And for most of us, this happens organically. We don’t need to comb the ATU for story ideas–because these are formulas we’ve been fed since we were young children. We automatically know that if a talking fox wanders out of the woods, or three princes go on a quest, we’re probably in a fairytale. Through simply living in a culture where these stories are ubiquitous, we all have a sort of invisible ATU index in our heads.
Angela: I think it can be any of those things, or none. My short story “Sourdough” actually comes from the spark of the “Donkeyskin” where the hidden princess makes food for the prince and leaves a piece of her jewellery in the meal every time, like she’s leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for him. I thought about how I might use that idea as part of a revenge story (ultimately the piece of jewellery left in the bread she bakes chokes the antagonist). So sometimes it’s a matter of unpicking a really fine skein of the story and re-weaving. The other things in that story that are fairy-tale’ish are the setting – a walled city – the culture – the rich people wanting fancy sculpted breads for their wedding feasts and the formality of how they exist – and the idea of the dark figure as a threat to the heroine. So it’s recognisable as a fairy tale without being super closely modelled/mimicking of a recognisable single one.
I have another, “The Tale’s in the Telling”, which does eventually name Baba Yaga and Vasilisa but for the most part it’s three versions of the same tale, which changes each time the protagonist tells the story because each time she confesses more and gives darker details away. The recognisable things are the child mistreated by a stepmother, dream logic, a long journey during which the protagonist lets go of possessions and also preconceived notions and finer ideas about themselves (so, elements of ego and thinking of herself as a “good” person).
Are there particular freedoms - or restrictions - in writing fairy tales and fairy tale-adjacent stories?
Angela: I think for me I like to at least start with a suggested shape or plot because I find that’s then easier to change or reshape the story. I mean, it’s the urge to go Frankenstein on something that already exists. “What if I remove this arm and put it over here? What if I change the narrator, what will they have to gain or lose by telling this story? How will they tell it? What information will they privilege in their telling?”
I think it’s a great opportunity to reconsider your own opinions and ideas, especially if you’ve been fed Cinderella stories all your life and think that winning the prince is the whole game and goal. Well, what if it’s not? What if you don’t worry about the prince? What if what you’d like is a quiet cottage in the woods that you don’t have to share with anybody? There’s a reason fairy tales don’t show the happy-ever-afters… because you just know that Prince Charming doesn’t ever put the toilet seat down, he doesn’t pick up after himself, doesn’t know how to make a cup of coffee to save himself…
I think the restrictions are only the ones you impose on yourself – how far are you prepared to tear the story from its original framework?
I also really love the way folklore is repurposed in the Lore podcast that GennaRose works on - everything is very much founded in a real world sensibility, then things just get split open when you bring in the folk tales…
GennaRose: Lore is such a blast to work on, because it focuses specifically on where supernatural belief and folklore intersect with real world history. I’m currently working on our 300th episode, all about Ouija boards, and how people have claimed these talking boards have instructed them to say, kill their husbands. It’s such a fantastic example of the way we use magical thinking and story to obscure the uglier truths of the world. Rather than admit to murder, a person can turn to this folklore and say, “It wasn’t me, it was the ghosts!”
Which, as a writer, is exactly why I love working within the “restrictions” of these tropes. To me, it actually provides a wild kind of freedom. I can write about anything–any taboo, any hot-button political issue, any vulnerable personal revelation–but feel protected behind a sheen of the fantastical. It’s the sugar with the medicine. A reader will swallow the hard truths and hopefully learn from them because they’re all gussied up in marvelous magic.
My novel Thistlefoot is entirely reliant on this strategy. At its heart, it’s a story about the evils of milataristic, genocidal governments. But hey, look over here–a walking house! A living puppet! A ghosty man with arms toooo long! And only slowly does the reader realize these fantatical elements are actually all metaphors for the uglier real-world story.
Are there fairy tale tropes or ideas that you think haven’t been examined properly yet, or that you’d like to see more of?
Angela: I think the role of older women needs expanding from just witch in the woods with a wart on her nose or the old nursemaid or cook in a big household - that somehow constantly malign character. It’s one of the things I’ve tried to do with my next novel A Forest, Darkly - looking at the power of older women and their experience, what if they choose not to be victims, what if they are really careful to organise a protected/protective life for themselves, and also acting as guides for younger women across the age spectrum so there’s less a sense of competition and divide.
GennaRose: Yes, I second the mention of A Forest, Darkly–it’s such a wonderful reclamation of the witch/crone archetype. Old women as a protagonists are such a rare thing, still; it was such a joy to find that in Angela’s book.
But okay also: vampires under water. Vampires don’t need to breathe! What if they were underwater?!!! Atlantis vampires? Titanic wreck vampires? Vampire pearl divers? Much to consider!
GennaRose Nethercott is the author of a novel, Thistlefoot, a Vermont Book Award winning short story collection, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart, and a book-length poem, The Lumberjack’s Dove, which was selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the National Poetry Series. A writer and folklorist alike, she helps create the podcast Lore, and she tours nationally and internationally performing strange tales (sometimes with puppets in tow). She lives in the woodlands of Vermont, beside an old cemetery.
Angela “A.G.” Slatter has won a Shirley Jackson Award, a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar, three Australian Shadows Awards, eight Aurealis Awards and a Premier Ignotus. She has a PhD in Creative Writing, is a graduate of Clarion South and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop and has been a judge for the World Fantasy and Aurealis Awards. Angela’s short stories have appeared in many Best Of anthologies, and her work has been translated into Bulgarian, Chinese, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Polish, French, Turkish, Czechoslovakian and Romanian. Her most recent novels, set in the Sourdough Universe, are currently published by Titan: All The Murmuring Bones, The Path of Thorns, The Briar Book of the Dead, The Crimson Road and the forthcoming A Forest Darkly (2026). A contemporary horror novella, The Cold House, was published in October 2025. She lives in Brisbane, Australia with a superannuated beagle and a TBR pile which will likely be the death of her. Find her on her website angelaslatter.com and on social media @angelaslatter