A Truly Dark Fairytale - A Review of The Devourers by Indra Das

The Devourers by Indra Das

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Nowadays, the term “dark fairytale” appears to have gained a certain kind of cachet, since it tend to be attached to a lot of media with a hype train a mile long. Of course, to define this term it is important to understand what its two components mean. I am certain folklorists and scholars can argue over the finer points of what makes a fairytale, but in general, a fairytale is a short story featuring fantastical elements like folkloric figures (hence “fairytale”, since fairies are out of folklore and myth), with clearly good and clearly evil characters, most of which fall into some kind of archetypical mould.

However, in many cases the oldest versions of fairytales were remarkably bloody and gory - a reflection, no doubt, of the dangers and difficulties of the lives of the people who told those stories in the first place. Take, for example, the Brothers Grimm version of Snow White, which features the Evil Queen eating the heart of a deer thinking it was Snow White’s, and said Evil Queen eventually punished by being forced to wear red-hot iron shoes and dancing herself to death. Compare that with the version that Disney put onscreen in 1937: no hearts are eaten and no Evil Queens are forced to dance to death. Since then, eliminating the bloodier details of fairytales has been de rigueur for Disney’s adaptations, and the subsequent popularity of such films has not only turned Disney into a media juggernaut, but has literally defined the term “fairytale” in popular culture.

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