Influential Books: The World’s Best Fairy Tales

Welcome to my weekly feature on Influential Books! Each week I showcase a book or series that profoundly influenced my writing. This week I’m discussing the Reader’s Digest World’s The World’s Best Fairy Tales anthology that I grew up with a kid.

A Family Treasure

This is my family’s copy of The World’s Best Fairy Tales, a Reader’s Digest Anthology edited by Belle Becker Sideman and illustrated by Fritz Kredel.

As far as I know, this book has been in my family since before I was born. It belonged to my older sister—who can have it back anytime! Love you!—and then when I came to read it later, it stayed with me in more than one way. I have carried this book with me on my several moves across the United States and up and down the West Coast. It is careworn and well-loved. It gave us much joy and inspiration. And I adored all the illustrations by Fritz Kredel.

Within the anthology, you’ll find all the classic fairy tales that Disney has now co-opted, and many others besides.

A Lifelong Influence Across Genres

A fascinating thing about classic fairy tales is that they’re often quite dark. They never shy away from scaring you with moral lessons or even just chaotic evil. Or, in the case of The Little Mermaid, an unhappy ending (spoiler-lol).

I’ve spoken about my favorite first American fairy tales, L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, in another post. None of those stories can be found in this anthology. Many of these are centuries old.

Their lyrical, dreamlike, disturbing, and sometimes nightmarish qualities provide endless inspiration for my own writing. I’ve written space fairy tales, fantasy fairy tales, and horror fairy tales.

I also adore stories with animals. I provided a picture of “Thumbelina” for a reason.

My Own Space Fairy Tale

In the second book of The Questrison Saga, Ephemeris, Galla-Deia lives a whimsical life on a star-city full of androids. But she is isolated from people, and when the galactic wizard Aeriod whisks her away (rather in a Hades/Persephone fashion), she begins a Princess in the Tower era in his asteroid castle floating just above the surface of the planet Rikiloi, seen on the front cover. Galla is isolated yet again, while she begins to understand her unique abilities during training with Aeriod. Aeriod, for his part, is something of an antihero in my series. The first act of Ephemeris works as a prequel to Heliopause, and then zips into its timeline to carry forward as a sequel.

When we see Aeriod in the past, just prior to meeting Galla, he is prickly and cold. In many ways, he plays the role of the Beast in “Beauty and the Beast,” and Galla plays the role of Beauty. Galla also explores the vast halls of Aeriod’s castle, much as Beauty did, giving her exploration a dreamlike, fairy tale aspect. Aeriod grows as a person due to his love for Galla. Galla continues her journey to many other planets (hence the book’s name), meeting many interesting people and creatures along the way. The complicated love that Galla and Aeriod share affects the entire galaxy.

My Collection of Cross-Genre Fairy Tales

Cross-genre maestro Adrian Tchaikovsky generously read and blurbed THE SHADOW GALAXY: A Collection of Short Stories and Poetry, written by me under the pen name J. Dianne Dotson. “Horrors and wonders” makes a perfect descriptor for the many tales in my book.

It’s separated into different sections: Shadow Shores (seaside tales), Tales of the Galaxy and a Place Called Earth (science fiction; some pulpy, some scary), Into the Darkest Hollow (horror), Love and Other Moments (romance or adjacent), and Far Appalachia (both true and fairy tale).

In “One Evening in Fogvale,” which opens the book in the Shadow Shores section, Miranda Mirthwick takes an evening stroll and finds herself in Fogvale, a fairy-like realm, in which much enchantment unfolds. There’s more than meets the eye to this tale though. Pay close attention to what they’re storing in their vast chambers.

In “The Queen and the Mountain Laurel,” in the Far Appalachia section, a young girl named Laurel encounters wood spirits on a high mountain in Tennessee…and they offer a valuable lesson to learn.

And even though “RODER” is a robot love story, it’s a fairy tale and horror tale at the same time, about one woman’s lifelong journey to help the person she loves, even if he’s a machine.

THE SHADOW GALAXY is published by Trepidatio Publishing and I’d love for you to read it.

I also wrote a short story called “In the Wood of Frost and Shadow,” a cozy fantasy High North folk tale about a tomten and a Yule stag at the Winter Solstice. The tomten is an elf-like, red-hooded, white-bearded little sprite who encounters aurora sprites, who are rather creepy and unearthly. He also meets up with frost fairies and speaks to all the animals he sees on the Solstice; they speak back, for the most part. You can read it in the anthology Winter of Wonder: Fauna 2022 from Cloaked Press.

I’ve written many more fairy tales, which I hope to add to a special fantasy collection at some point. There is never a wrong time to write about mystical encounters, allegories, cautionary tales, or just tales of enchantment for the sake of it. Wonder can be found everywhere, and channeled onto the page. The World’s Best Fairy Tales helped me tremendously on my writing journey.

Write on!
Jendia