Tales the Devil Told Me
by Jen Fawkes
Press 53, $17.95 paperback, 178 pages
One might start off reading Jen Fawkes’ series of “re-imagining” short stories with cynical expectations of trope characters handily placed in updated fairy tales or familiar stories told from a previously unconsidered perspective. Perhaps we’d get the story of Cinderella from a mouse’s perspective or from the point of view of the Fairy Godmother or maybe a Fairy Godfather. Perhaps we’d get the underside of the story of Red Riding Hood’s tale from the mouth of the Wolf, hearing his inner thoughts as he leers at the unsuspecting girl through the trees and waits for her in her Grandmother’s bed. Instead, Fawkes attempts something slightly left of center in these re-imaginings, offering the reader not simply retellings of stories we know, but “further tellings.”
This is a story collection of villains and monsters and misunderstood ogres, of marginalized characters from stories we know, attempting to give insight into where they came from and where did they go. These are stories of the before and the after, with just a hint or a passing glance at the original (often middle) story. For example, in As You Can Imagine, This Makes Dating Difficult we are reacquainted with Medusa, the monster of Greek myth who can turn men into stone with one glance. But instead of telling us the common story of the cursed creature, Fawkes chooses to show us this misunderstood woman years later through the perspective of a plastic surgeon suffering from a career mid-life crisis who has fallen for Medusa because of the very fact that he can’t see her face (she wears a burlap sack over her head). History is not ignored here—Medusa still killed countless men in her centuries-old past—but she has changed since then, she has grown out of her rage, she is even finding some success headlining a local band with her sisters. Does she not deserve love too? Does this doctor not deserve to find a woman whom he can love and with whom he can live a normal life? But when does one cross the line from desire to infatuation and then to fetishism? Fawkes’ explores these questions without necessarily giving tidy answers.
In Never, Never, the tale of Captain Hook post-Neverland, again we are told a story through the perspective of an original character. This time it’s that of Captain Hook’s stepson, who resents Hook’s intrusion into his life. Here Hook is well-meaning, having given up his pirating life to work for the post office and live a normal existence with a family and a mortgage. But his attempts to bond with his stepson are met with typical teenage rebellion and there’s a tragic irony in the stepson’s decision to forgo college and become a seafarer and pirate against his stepfather’s wishes. In Dynamics Fawkes’ introduces us to a young woman from a broken home who inherits her absent father’s obsession with mathematics. She matriculates at a university where the chair of the mathematics department is a little known and little understood Professor Moriarty. In this woman’s story we are given a bit of a taste of a prequel; these are events that happen before Moriarity goes onto become a rumored “criminal mastermind…grappling with a sleuth of great renown.” And in fact this narrative isn’t about Moriarity’s criminal obsessions, but rather it focuses on the young woman’s obsession with the professor and her delusions of a perceived romantic relationship between them. Through the lens of one person’s madness we see a softer side of a familiar madman.
In fact madness plays a large role in many of Fawkes’ stories, “madness” having always been a common catch-all in fables and fairy tales for mental illness and addiction. Themes of alcoholism and addiction, dementia and delusion are heavily threaded throughout Fawkes’ tales, redefining familiar antagonists with relatable problems that underlie their archetypal villainy. In The Tragedie of Claudius, Prince of Denmark, the longest story that centers the collection, a deeper view into the mental history of the Danish royal family lends new understanding of the true curse that haunts dreary Elsinore. And one might even walk away from the read with an unexpected sympathy for the “wicked” Uncle upon whom Hamlet swore vengeance.
If there is an overarching theme to this story collection it might be the idea of inherited trauma. Do we pass our traumas onto successive generations? Can we absorb trauma from others simply by familial relation or perhaps by familiarity? In Tigers Don’t Apologize, a middle-aged Mowgli has trouble understanding why his toddler son aggressively believes he’s not a human boy but instead is the reincarnated Shere Khan, the tiger his father brutally killed when he was a child of the jungle. How does Mowgli come to terms with his past and how his history affects his present? Across her stories, Fawkes illuminates these characters’ traumas in an attempt to not only explain and humanize their circumstances and actions, but also to offer a chance of redemption. An underlying question bubbles to the surface: can understanding trauma not only explain but also help absolve? Are we bound by our trauma, duty-bound to accept it as our fate?
Probably my favorite story (favorite, if for no other reason than that it was an unexpected origin story for an unexpected character—hint: it’s based from Snow White) ends with the protagonist reflecting on another character’s well known fate. They know it will only go one way, and yes, they will help them choose that tragic end. But in just knowing how it will end they understand that there’s always the possibility of something different, leaving us, the reader with the hope that the alternate, happier ending could happen for them, remarking that “After all, this tale is still being written.”
