I've always been fascinated with fairy tales. No, not the sanitized versions with singing raccoons or whatever. I mean the cautionary tales. The ones where the point of the story is to warn. Don't trust strangers. Elves and fairies want to eat you. Witches don't sing showtunes just because they are "misunderstood." Monsters are monsters. If they are sexy, it's for the purpose of killing you easier.
And so we come to the point of this anthology.
The idea of taking fairy tales back to their dark roots-to the horror and dread in them-was one of the premier goals of the stories presented beyond this introduction. Twisting them in dark and imaginative ways. Another of my goals was to have a few stories that would make the reader chuckle as things go horrifically bad for the characters. Horror and humor are often found skipping arm-in-arm over the river and through the woods together, after all.