Adaptations of fairy tales can be pretty fun - showing a story the audience has known since childhood and reflecting it back to them through a different lens can highlight aspects of the original story they may not have seen before, and lifting the entire story and setting it in another context can work amazingly as well.
Joan D. Vinge's The Snow Queen (1980), takes the original Hans Christian Andersen story and places it in a science fiction setting, on a planet called Tiamat. As with the original story, it follows two young children through a journey that tests their friendship, separates them, and shows the power of love and forgiveness in relationships.
There was a lot I liked about this book - the planet in which the story takes place alternates between technology and tribal rule every 150 years, the palace intrigue reminded me an awful lot of Dune (Frank Herbert, 1965), and the concept of Sibyls, as in the oracles of Ancient Greece, transferred quite nicely into the SF setting.
The story moves quite quickly, and is filled with all sorts of fun intrigue and concepts, but in the end I felt that the author actually stayed too close to the source material, allowing me to see where the story was going well in advance. A fun book to read, but not one I've ended up keeping on my shelves.
And here we end our visit to Hemlock Grove.
In the end, the show is a different take on a classic monster mashup, think Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man but in an updated version.
Throughout the season, the series attempts to show how these mythical beings would act and interact in a contemporary setting. In many ways it can be considered Magic realism, but in terms of a Horror, rather than a Fantastic setting.
In many ways the show is a success in what it sets out to do; the vampire, werewolf, and monster elements work in a "real world" setting. In many ways the story works more as a thriller with horror elements than simply a classic horror story.
The pacing of the series does sometimes work against it - as the story attempts to stretch across the course of thirteen episodes, most of the episodes work, but I ended up feeling like the series could have worked at ten, rather than thirteen, episodes.
The series works best when it focuses on the growing relationship between Peter and Roman, showing how their friendship changes and grows during the course of the murder investigation, and although my personal favourite character was Shelley (the series version of the Frankenstein's monster), the human side of these characters is what worked best for me.
In the end, I'm not sure whether I'll be following up with the later seasons - but as the first season was a pretty straight adaptation of the novel, I'd like to see what the creators end up doing with these characters once the go off book.
Thanks for hanging out with me for another Ocotober!
The retelling of fairy tales has always had a particular interest for me, whether as viewer, player, reader, or even attempting to try my hand at writer. I've long been a fan of Bill Willingham's Fables, and before that the Snow White, Blood Red series, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.
So, a little burned from Disney's last attempt "Oz the Great and Powerful", my family decided to give the 2014 film Maleficent a try.
To begin, the movie looks amazing, the effects are great , the imagery is wonderful, and it visually ties in quite nicely with the 1959 Disney film. The story works from the point of view of the "evil" fairy Maleficent, who in the original story is the one who curses Beauty to die on the day of her sixteenth birthday.
Stories told from the villains point of view are always tricky; how, in their back story, can you show the audience the reasons behind their dark deeds, and hopefully win their sympathy? In Maleficent, they (mild spoiler) do this by introducing Sleeping Beauty's father as a character years before the events of the fairy tale. This works really well, but does ad a certain darkness to the film that moves the intended audience up by quite a few years from that of the Disney Classic.
In the end, both of my kids loved the film, and my wife and I were cautiously optimistic about it. It's not my favourite villain retelling of a fairy tale, for that you'd need to read Neil Gaiman's Snow, Glass, Apples but it was a pretty great show nonetheless.
I think I'm just on a roll with my Charles de Lint reading right now.
Last month I read Yarrow and absolutely loved it - the merging of high fantasy (completely new world) and magic realism (wherein magical events happen in our world), was just incredible, and the characters were becoming incredibly strong, three-dimensional people that I would either love to meet, or in the cases of the villain, found intriguing.
…and then I hit Jack the Giant Killer.
This book is absolutely brilliant, it takes concepts from fairy tales and specifically merges them with modern day (well, 1987) Ottawa - which was amazing, and then begins to hint that the Ottawa of Jack the Giant Killer is also the Ottawa of Moonheart - just in a quick reference to a physical location, but still, this is the kind of stuff I get excited about when reading Terry Pratchett or Stephen King.
The novel focuses on a girl named Jackie Rowan, who ends up becoming the "Jack" in a fairy tale, which is both a lot of fun with gender-swapping the traditional role, and bringing forth an incredibly fun character, also Jackie starts doing things that may not work exactly in traditional fairy tales, but make a heck of a lot of sense if strange magic stuff started happening around a real person - like telling her best friend.
This book is great. I spent almost half the story smiling and the other half really anxious about what was going to happen to this great character.
