As you learn more about the history of fairy tales, you begin to learn that they are often times, horror stories of an intensely absurd caliber. That’s not a bad thing really. Often times people enjoy being scared to a degree. Many kids love scary stories, and in the time when many of these traditional stories were conceived, life itself was pretty horrifying. But these tales of transformed over time to become a bit milder. Who better to take them back to their roots than Stephen King, with a little help from beyond the grave by Maurice Sendak.
Stephen King should need no introduction, Sendak shouldn’t either but in case you don’t recognize the name, he’s the man who wrote and illustrated “Where the Wild Things Are,” amongst many other projects. You may also know him as the artist behind the “Little Bear” book series which later became its own cartoon series. Sendak passed away in 2012 leaving behind some unrealized projects. One of them was illustrations for a planned opera of the Brothers Grimm story, “Hansel and Gretel.” While the project was never finished, the estate of Sendak reached out to King to turn the project into a book with King doing the scripting and the audiobook narration.
“I just wanted to make the words fit the illustrations,” King said. “The Sendak pictures were for an opera, and I don’t have any record of what the characters said. And I thought this would be a very exciting challenge, to find ways to make the fairy tales fit the pictures, to make it as seamless as possible.” Beyond that, King used his experience in knowing fairy tales and his understanding of writing tropes to craft something that’s a bit different from the standard story, while not straying too far from the original.
What’s more is that this isn’t even King’s first time writing a children’s story. In his third book in “The Dark Tower” series “The Waste Lands,” there’s an in-universe children’s book called “Charlie the Choo-Choo.” In 2016, that book was turned into a real-life version that King wrote under the pseudonym Beryl Evans. Which is to say, King has no problem terrifying young children. And if you want to double down on creeping out your kids, get the audiobook version so you can hear Stephen King read your children to sleep.
“Hansel and Gretel” written by Stephen King with illustrations by Maurice Sendak is available now. You can get it from Amazon here.
