"Hansel and Gretel" has always been one of my least favorite fairy tales. I hated the version where the parents fell on hard times and led the children in the woods to abandon them because they had little money for food. And I hated the version where the mother dies and the father remarries and the mean stepmother persuades him to lead them into the woods and abandon them. I really hated the version where the children return home after the witch is killed and find their stepmother gone and their father repentant. I always wondered how on earth they could trust him after what he did or more importantly, why they would want to trust him after that. It was like after somehow managing to survive they still had to be weak enough to want Daddy - no matter how flawed that daddy was.

Okay, this is my all time least favorite fairy tale.

I read Margo Lanagan's take on the story in the Del Rey Book of SFF with some trepidation though. Lanagan is an awesome talent - a bewildering, dazzling, soul defying talent. But she also hurts to read sometimes. Her stories are so intense, so brutal that sometimes I just can not bear to go where she insists on taking the reader. Lanagan never ever shies away from truth and truth, when we are honest, is rarely about the happily ever after.

I could only imagine what she would do with those kids in the woods.

I wasn't surprised to see that a pedophile had a major part of her story, "The Goosle". I always thought this was a story about pedophilia even though it is rarely obviously about that. The house made of candy in the woods? How many times have we been warned to fear strangers bearing candy? The adults mess with the children from the beginning in all sorts of emotional and psychological ways. The violent confrontation with the witch to save their lives seemed like the Disney version of the story to me. I long harbored suspicions that the original tale was about something even darker than murder and of course, because the dark is a place that Lanagan does not fear in her writing, she goes there.

"The Goosle" is about Hansel, Gretel having long ago died a victim of the witch. The plague is running rampant across the countryside and survival is the order of the day. Hansel escaped the witch, but found a monster. He is now trapped in a cycle of victimization where he submits to painful sexual acts in return for fleeting moments of tenderness which remind him of home, of his mother, of the life he knew long before the plague and the woods and the witch and this awful man. Hansel is a survivor and in the time he knows, survivors have few options.

Blood and violence appear in "The Goosle" but again - they were always there in this story, just covered up with candy and that final almost comical push into the oven. We turned "Hansel and Gretel's" story into something silly over the years; a warning about strangers that should have been terrifying but has becoming like a lark or casual adventure. There never should have been anything bloodless about this story and frankly I welcomed all the horrors that Lanagan gave it because finally - at last - it is real.

It's hard to simply recommend "The Goosle" because it is upsetting - it disturbs as much as it enlightens. But some stories are supposed to scare the crap out of us; some stories are supposed to make us wary for what might come or thankful for what we have. Before "The Goosle", this was a throwaway tale, another bad joke about stepmothers or a lesson in not getting lost.

It was a joke.

Now Hansel is the one who lived and Gretel the one he mourns and their family the ones who were lost. Everyone else are monsters - real monsters and they get exactly what they deserve. Hansel is the hero not just for getting away in the end but for living in the midst of so much death - for hanging in there when so many others would have given up.

Margo Lanagan has made Hansel the strongest survivor to come out of fairy tale land in a long long time. I'll take it - I'll take him. My heart hurts from this story, but I'll take it so finally I can have him.

More reviews of stories from the anthology here and here.

UPDATED: I should have be clear that the Disney version of the story I was referring to was in the story books - I believe Mickey and Minnie played the characters of Hansel and Gretel but honestly it has been so long that I'm a bit fuzzy on the details. My point was a more generic idea of a "Disneyfied fairy tale". Via Ellen Datlow I received this info on a Disney performance:

The Disney version of HANSEL AND GRETE is Humperdinck's opera. Sendak and Corsaro (in a production done all over the world but apparently not since 1997 at Juilliard, national PBS telecast) unDisneyfied it completely.

[Post pic of Happy Hansel and Gretel dolls - would you believe they retail for over $100?!]