Fairy tale and the bizarre

A very stimulating essay here by Tobias Carroll, ‘Why we love weird fairy tales’, tracing the career of the unsettling imagery found in the original fairy tale–here, particularly Giambattista Basile’s seventeenth-century collection The Tale of Tales. Carroll then shows the appeal of this dark logic and how it has been employed by contemporary writers such as Angela Carter, Joy Williams, Michael Cunningham, Amber Spark, Helen Oyeyemi, and Joanna Walsh (writers who I need to explore).