Overall, super enjoyed this collection. I feel that occasionally it tried too hard on the stories — a few felt too similar (for example — Mr. Toad, The Princess Frog, and "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors"), but they were still fun to read. It's quick and light while providing commentary.

My favorite hands down is "The Six Boy-Coffins" followed by "Fear Not: An Incident Log." I would read an entire book of the second one without a doubt. "The Rabbit" actually terrified me, and "The Merry Spinster" actually made me laugh quite a bit. It also reminded me of The Love Witch with the juxtaposition of the fairy tale with modern day settings.

If you like fairy tales, if you loved The Toast, I recommend this. It's not a horror book, but it's a good quick collection of retellings.

The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror by Mallory Ortberg is a collection of retellings. Most of the retellings are of fairy tales, but some are based on other literature such as the tale, "The Rabbit," which is based on the Velveteen Rabbit. There are 11 tales in total.

There is a horrifying aspect to each story. Mallory Ortberg takes a tale that has some level of darkness to it and twists it to make it even darker. For example, the retelling based on "The Little Mermaid" has a particularly gruesome necessity that must be met before she can return to the sea.

The tales also have a feminist aspect to them. The female characters are not all submissive and often take an active role in their fate. And often the pronoun he or she is used for what appears to be someone of the opposite sex. In the "Frog Princess," the princess is consistently referred to with the pronoun he.

I gave this collection 3 out of 5 stars. I liked it. It was ok. I didn't love it. To be honest, I didn't enjoy it much. I found the pronoun use in some of the tales more confusing than edifying. I did find several of the tales haunting though. If you like dark retellings, there's a good chance you will like this collection.

The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror by Mallory Ortberg was released March 13, 2018 from Henry Holt and Company.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley. All opinions herein are my own and freely given.

Dark and other-worldly stories that ask you to take a look at how much of yourself you give to others, how much they take from you, and what is left.

Five deconstructed stories are featured in this eclectic collection of fairy tales that are disturbing and confounding. Not to be confused with a revision, these stories add an element or two that will jump at readers and twist their mind to accommodate the new. It is not so much horror in a sense that is bloody but it imparts a feeling of never finding a footing on what is being expressed--a strange unease that distorts the purpose of a fairy tale and turns it into a puzzle.

This was a really great book of fairytale retellings. I like how she often took inspiration from more than one story at a time [all the source stories are listed at the end of the book] instead of just doing a straight retelling but with dark elements added. It definitely helped keep my interest because I didn't always know where the story was going, which I find is the problem with a lot of fairytale retellings these days. These are definitely darker than the Disney versions you are probably familiar with and also have a lot of feminist undertones that set them apart from the originals as well. There were a few at the end that I wasn't as into, but for the most part these were very enjoyable.

I know it is tempting to plow through a new book by Ortberg, but these stories demand to be savored, and I think benefit from it too. Ortberg is playing with fairy tale tropes and bible stories to create stories that are weird, hilarious, creepy, and sad, and sometimes all four at the same time. If you already love Ortberg's writing, this is another winner; if you’re not familiar, the first story in the book--Ortberg's take on The Little Mermaid—will be a good litmus test. A/A-.

I received this copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchnge for an honest review.
The Merry Spinster is a collection of short stories that have their basis in traditional fairy tales. I love seeing fairy tales retold with a twist, and I was familar with Ortberg's Texts from Jane Eyre, so I was exsited to see what The Merry Spinster had in store.
Each story was well written and enough of the original fairy tale was woven into it that readers can recognize where the story came from. Unfortuantly for me, I didn't enjoy these retold tales. They were too odd for my taste, and when reading a few of them, I felt like prehaps I had missed something that was crucial to fully understanding the story. I know this book will find an audience, but in this case, that audience is not me.

Review here: https://angryangelbooks.com/2018/03/12/the-merry-spinster-tales-of-everyday-horror/

The Merry Spinster by Mallory Ortberg is a collection of dark short stories inspired by class fairy tales.


Overall, I liked this book of short stories. What kept me from ranking this book higher was that some of the stories were so strange and confusing that I couldn't quite follow the tales.


The writing in the book was decent. The author did a great job of giving just enough details to keep the stories progressing, while at the same time not overloading the stories with details. I liked the whimsy and magic that was woven into the stories, as well as the darkness that haunted many of the tales.


My favorite short story in the book was The Daughter Cells, which is inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. This is a dark and twisted version of the The Little Mermaid, worlds apart from the Disney version. I liked how deeply twisted the story was and how the protagonist wasn't content with the ordinary human life.


I also enjoyed The Six Boy-Coffins, which was inspired by a couple different fairy tales. Again, this story was dark, mischievous, and quirky, a story of sacrifice and love.


On the flip side, I couldn't quite figure out Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Mr. Toad or The Frog's Princess. I thought these two stories were hard to follow and didn't make a lot of sense.


Some of the stories ended too abruptly for my taste. I know they're short stories, but some of the them felt like they needed a couple more pages of wrap-up before they were truly done.


Again, overall I liked this collection of stories. This book was an entertaining quick read, perfect for a lazy Sunday afternoon. If you like short stories, this book is worth checking out.


Thank you to NetGalley for providing the Kindle version of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This review will be posted on my blog on March 13th. (https://thriftybibliophile.com)

Mallory Ortberg's darkly irreverent collection of short stories takes most of its inspiration from classic fairy tales, with a few other well-known stories (including the Bible, King Lear) also figuring into the source material.

The result is a mixed bag in terms of quality and execution. About half of the stories are above average to outstanding, and the other half should probably never have been published. Thus the collection would have been a greater success if the author and editor had been more choosy about what made it into the final copy.

A different arrangement of the stories would also have helped. Most of the tales placed in the first half of the book were quite good. Nearly all of those in the second half were weak enough that I struggled not to skim them.

The standout here is probably The Rabbit, an uber-creepy and delightful take on The Velveteen Rabbit. The Six Boy Coffins was a close second. Also notably good were the title track (if you will) The Merry Spinster, Fear Not: An Incident Log (which takes cues from the Book of Genesis) and The Daughter Calls, which takes fewer liberties with the original material (here, The Little Mermaid) than most of the stories, but is still a good read. The only story I didn't care for in the first half of the book was The Thankless Child, a failed adaptation of Cinderella.

As for the second half (stories 7 to 11), there isn't a standout or even a modestly good offering in the bunch, hence the suggestion that this collection suffered from a decision to prioritize quantity over quality.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed Ortberg's writing style and humor in general, and found a few stories in the bunch that I thought were truly wonderful. This collection is worth a read, though it has more weeds than roses.

I am not a big horror reader, so it is difficult to say if these stories succeeded as works of horror or not. I enjoyed them, for what it's worth, but it is not my genre of expertise. That said, what was truly a delight for me was the prose style. Despite the creepiness of the stories, the prose was very enjoyable to me. It reminded me of Terry Pratchett or Wodehouse, with it's wryness and playfulness and wit, though not funny necessarily. I can also see the prose that I enjoyed being a stumbling block for other people.

The Merry Spinster joins the ongoing, rich lineage of fairy tale retellings. Regular online readers of literary matters will know Mallory Ortberg from The Toast, where their witty and sharp takes on classic art and literature were always a treat. This collection has evolved from a particular series that ran on the site and involved recasting classic children’s stories as horror stories. Ortberg also currently runs the Dear Prudence column at Slate.

As with some of those earlier web versions, this collection gives us Ortberg’s trademark gender-swapping, flipping of accepted norms of good vs evil even while blurring the line between them, and startling backstories that do not always reveal underlying motivations but definitely add dark, ironic humor.

For the most part, though, the aim here is, as the book’s subtitle describes, to blend the fantastical into a mostly everyday sort of world and to turn the endings into darker, more horrific ones — either from actual violence or the kind of banality that is worse than violence. The latter is interesting because, while one of the key features of the classic fairy tale tends to be “transformation,” some of these stories end with not much changing after all, as happens so often in real life. In a recent interview, Ortberg describes this sense of everyday horror as follows: “A lot of the book asks: What does it mean to not recognize something that you’re very familiar with? What does it mean to be around something constantly and not know it? What would that make your daily life look like and in what ways would that make your own life essentially unbearable to you?”

[The rest of the review will be linked when it is published.]

"She was beginning to learn the danger of silence, and that someone who wishes to hear a yes will not go out of his way to listen for a no."

The Merry Spinster is a delightful collection of dark, amusing, and sometimes disturbing fractured fairy tales. There are no neat happily-ever-after endings here and no clear delineation of good and evil or villains and heroes. Though the fantastical remains, Ortberg tackles subjects such as misogyny, women's agency, and abusive relationships in ways that make these stories at times become like a mirror of modern society as well as critiques of these issues in the original versions. Though language, Ortberg also plays with gender roles and expectations throughout the book. She uses traditionally female names with male pronouns, traditionally male names with female pronouns, and "daughters" are on one occasion given male pronouns. These conventions disrupted my expectations about how the stories would unfold even when I recognized the original fairy tale, though I think Ortberg could have gone even farther in challenging gender roles by including more specifically queer characters and being more direct in her gender reversals. Closing her collection, Ortberg cites her sources for each story and how she combined classic children's stories and fairy tales together at times, which I loved. Overall, this is a really solid and original collection of tales that I thoroughly enjoyed.

I thought that this was a solid book of stories, all of which were inspired by a fairy tale or myth. There were some that I really liked and some that just didn’t quite do it for me, but the writing itself was consistently good. I cautiously suggest picking it up if you’re a fan of retellings.

If you liked Ortberg's fairy tale pieces on The Toast, you'll love this. It's full of his weird, dark humor and genderqueer takes on fairy tales. Some (his take on The Six/Twelve Brothers) aren't really too far off the standard telling, but others are vastly different and wonderful. I really hope for further collections like this from Ortberg.

The Merry Spinster is a collection of fairy tales and fables (think the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen as opposed to Disney) and reimagines them in a darker, more sinister light.

It takes those many-times-told stories of our childhood such as The Little Mermaid and The Velveteen Rabbit (click these links to read them free at Project Gutenberg), puts a butcher knife in the main characters’ hands, and lets them stab their way through to bloodily disparate endings. Happily ever after is certainly in the eye of the beholder, and it doesn’t always happen on a wedding aisle.

Keep in mind, Hans Christian Andersen and The Brothers Grimm were, well, grim to begin with. With tales of child-abandoning fathers, child-eating witches, and suicidal mermaids, their stories serve as warnings against all evils and dangers that lurk in the dark, dark woods of life.

Part of the fun of The Merry Spinster is matching the book’s story to the fable to figure out what it’s emulating. I thought I was familiar with the source stories, but was at a loss to identify a couple of them, namely the one with the ill-fated couple and the aggressively insecure husband to be who hates his fiance’s relationship with her odd friend. Any ideas on which one that was?

The fables here match the same writing style and formality of the time period of the fables when they were originally written. They’re not modern retellings with modern vernacular. All of these stories could still exist in their original time periods. Some readers may find this type of writing (and slower-burn reading) a bit frustrating. Stick with it. On many of these stories, it’s worth the payoff.

Overall, The Merry Spinster offers an interesting and strangely satisfying look at fables. Dare I say, some of these have better endings than the originals.

Comic horror seems like an oxymoron, but this collection of fairytale retellings combines the two in short stories that are both creepy and absurd. Ortberg's tone and voice are right on for this combination. My favorite story by far was "The Rabbit," a retelling of The Velveteen Rabbit. Boy is it creepy! And the dialog between the skin horse and the rabbit was hilarious and creepy. I'll never look at that story the same way. I also quite liked "The Six-Boy Coffins," a retelling of "The Six Swans," that has some feminist justice dolled out, and similarly I enjoyed the opening story "The Daughter Cells," a feminist Little Mermaid retelling, and the gender fluidity in the Cinderella retelling "The Thankless Child," though the religion was a bit confusing. One that will also stick with me, though I can't say I 'liked' it, was "Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Mr. Toad." It's a well written story, and made me so uncomfortable! This story portrays passive aggressive friendships to the extreme. Some of the story endings read as incomplete, though some endings felt right on. Overall, it's a great collection for those who enjoy good fairytale retellings.

Thanks to Netgalley and Henry Holt and Company for providing me with a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Posted on Goodreads 03/08. Will be reviewed on Book Riot as well.]

Chilling, eerie, and unexpected, Ortberg's short stories explore psychological horror, dysphoria, and unsettling twists in familiar fairytales. Fans of the author's previous work will enjoy these stories, but don't hesitate to offer it up to fans of Shirley Jackson, Nalo Hopkinson, and general speculative fiction/horror. Ortberg's retelling of The Little Mermaid alone is worth the price of admission.

Netgalley review.

Goodreads Rating: 3.5 stars, rounded down to 3.

This was a fun collection of fairy tale and other classic story retellings, all with a modern and “everyday” take on them. Rather than being full on fairy tales, where magic is a fantastical element, these take on a more magical realist feel, where it’s a fact of life and plays more of an underlying, but still important, role. The horror aspect was mostly a psychological horror, rather than the more physical, jumpscare that I was expecting. But that didn’t make the theme of the retellings any less effective, and may have made some of the stories better than regular horror would have.

It was a *very* hit and miss collection for me, but many of the stories I wasn’t too crazy about where from stories that I had never read before (or even heard of), so as with any collection, your mileage may vary depending on what of the source material you’ve read. In addition to the fairy tales, there are some traditional kids books, Bible/Christian stories, and ballads adapted as well.

"The Daughter Cells" was a bit boring, but I still enjoyed this retelling of "The Little Mermaid." The dark turn of events at the end make for a happy ending for Ariel that doesn’t involve a prince–at least not in the typical sense.

"The Six Boy-Coffins" was my favorite of the entire collection. I loved the ending and loved the gender swapping. In general, I kept expecting to have my enjoyment crushed by a trope AND I DIDN’T! I loved it. This would be the one story of the collection I’d go back and reread.

"The Velveteen Rabbit" has always been a tragic and terrifying kids book. "The Rabbit," which reimagines this tale, was just plain terrifying. It was the only story I considered proper horror.

Both the "Wind in the Willows" and "Frog and Toad" inspired stories had SO MUCH GASLIGHTING, oh my goodness. There’s so much that the stories themselves might be better off with a trigger warning…. While Mr. Toad is not a character easy to be sympathetic towards in the original story, with this retelling, I most certainly felt sorry for him.

It’s a unique and fun collection of shorts, recommended for those who like the darker sides of fairy tales and traditional tales!

I enjoy fairy tale retellings and I don’t object to dark ones, so I was looking forward to this book. In the end, though, I was disappointed. Three of the stories (retellings of The Little Mermaid, The Velveteen Rabbit and The Seven Swans), I found excellent, the rest ranged from just-okay to not-my-cup-of-tea. The writing was good - often lyrical, in fact - but several of the stories were just incomprehensible. The author also dabbled with gender fluidity. I found that, given the confined space of a short story, this was off putting. In a novel, it could have been an interesting part of the world building. But with only 15 pages to work with, it was just confusing.

This review was based on an ARC ebook received by the publisher in return for an honest, unbiased review.