The new anthology, Troll's Eye View: A Book of Villianous Tales, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling is now out for the reading pleasure of your favorite middle grade scary-book reader. (My kids devoured all of Alvin Schwartz's wonderfully ghoulish and creepy tales at that age.) The anthology offers versions of well-known fairy tales, but from a unique perspective -- the villains'. Do they really suffer at the hands of our familiar heroes and heroines? In my story "Molly," based on the English fairy tale "Molly Whuppie," the Giant ogre and his family are certainly made to suffer cruel and unusual punishments. In the traditional version of the tale Molly Whuppie is a heroic youngest sister, outwitting a flesh eating Giant, and securing riches for her sisters as well as royal marriages -- on the Giant's dime of course.
However, I always felt a bit bad for the Giant -- after all he was minding his own business before Molly and her sisters, abandoned by their parents, descended on his house tucked away in the forest and started meddling with his wife, his wealth, and his children. And before she's done with him, Molly steals his gold, tricks him into beating his own wife and strangling his own daughters, and mocks him when he chases after her. As I wrote in the afterword of my version:
"So who is really the monster? Was Molly jealous of the giant's daughters because their parents loved them? Was she greedy because he was only a monster and didn't deserve his wealth? Did she hate the giant and his human wife because they were different from the people she knew?"
If ever there was a case for slander and libel!
The whole anthology is wonderful with such fine writers as Delia Sherman, Ellen Kushner, Holly Black, Peter Beagle, Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link, Jane Yolen, and others. Here's a reveiw that appeared in the April School Library Journal and another one from Robert Marcus in Blogcritics.org.