Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s ‘The Merry Spinster’ puts horrific twists on your favorite fairy tales

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Everyone knows how classic fairytales are supposed to go: they start with “Once upon a time” and  end with a “happily ever after.” 

But for Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s story collection The Merry Spinster, “happily ever after” comes with a heavy price.

The Merry Spinster is a collection of short stories, each that riff off of the classic fairy tales you read as kids. In Ortberg’s retellings, The Little Mermaid becomes “The Daughter Cells,” a story that seems, at first, ambivalent at best about its protagonist (“Daughters are as good a thing as any to populate a kingdom with — if you’ve got them on hand.”) before descending in incredible violence. Meanwhile, Cinderella is merged with Shakespeare’s King Lear and the Bible‘s book of Psalms to become The Thankless Child. Read more…

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