Butchers strip the carcass of an ethereal being while a crippled boy seeks his place among the menfolk in ‘An Honest Day’s Work’. His search is funhouse-mirrored in ‘Heads’ by young Sheegeh’s drifting. The boy finds himself the captive of a group of survivors who believe that his golden locks bring them luck. The innocent Sheegeh fits in effortlessly with the war-scarred band of murderers, thieves, and rapists, seemingly content to drift among the detritus of civilisation until the wind changes and whips him off to another place. One boy struggles to belong, his bonds forged in crises, while the other is accepted so readily that his bonds lack the strength to tie him down.

A reimagining of the Rapunzel story in ‘The Golden Shroud’ presages Sheegeh’s providence, and the sensorial, fairytale-esque ‘The Point of Roses’ demonstrates the power of memory, change, and threes. In ‘Eyelids of the Dawn’, a city expunges a landmark, witnessed by a half-mad milkman and a woman enslaved to the child at her breast. A trip to the Underground in ‘Ferryman’ proves that no job is ever truly finished and that the grandest acts emerge as a result of the smallest occurrences. There is a firsthand account of the Egyptian plagues in ‘Night of the Firstlings’. Told from the perspective of a Jewish family, it questions the possibility of safety when an Old Testament God’s wrath is unleashed. A Fascinator gets sweet revenge (‘A Fine Magic’), a woman is called to a higher purpose (‘Into the Clouds on High’), and something untoward happens among the freaks at a circus (‘Living Curiosities’).

Lanagan’s style is lyrical, her range broadly interconnected, strange yet closely familiar. Her worlds are as real and unreal as our own. In drawing these ten stories together, Lanagan takes the universal and unknowable myth and brings it down to the level of home and hearth through the eyes of an innocent child, the noses of an elderly married couple, and the ears of a panicked, huddled family. Yellowcake reminds readers that fantasy is, in essence, the most human way of exploring the things beyond our ken.

If Lanagan’s personal mythologies hold Yellowcake together, it is the shared mythology of fairy tale that binds the six stories in The Wilful Eye. Isobelle Carmody and Nan McNab gave twelve writers (six in this volume, including Carmody, six in a volume to follow, including McNab) a simple brief: explore a fairy tale through the short story form. The only rule: no two writers could choose the same tale. The first volume includes stories by Margo Lanagan (‘Catastrophic Disruption of the Head’), Carmody (‘Moth’s Tale’), Rosie Borella (‘Eternity’), Richard Harland (‘Heart of the Beast’), Margaret Mahy (‘Wolf Night’), and Martine Murray (‘One Window’). Each story is followed by a short ‘Afterword’ from its respective author, about which fairy tales were chosen and why, and how they were altered. These superfluous exegeses are by far the weakest links in the collection. Part of the enjoyment in reading the stories lies in determining which fairy tales they were based on; complete in themselves, these stories do not need further comment or explication.

Fairy tales are a neat fit for the Young Adult category. Traditionally, such stories were not intended exclusively for children; they were altered to make them ‘suitable’. In this collection, they are reinvigorated with the often gritty realism common in contemporary Young Adult fiction. Here it is employed to haul the original essences of the tales back to the surface so that readers, of all ages, will be drawn to the magic and the truth in each.

In her offering, Lanagan deals with the consequences of the heinous acts that fairy-tale ‘heroes’ often commit, and that are usually glossed over, in the pursuit of their goals. Murray deals with another type of hero in her crippled Soldier, but his innocence stands him apart from Lanagan’s narrator. Borella plays with an icy metaphor as her heroine takes to the streets to rescue her drug-addicted best friend. Mahy also invokes a cityscape, but hers is made wild and more dangerous by a reversion to the wild woods on which suburbia was built, and by the inclusion of a sinister stepfather. The stories of Carmody and Harland are closer to their source material in setting and tone, but no less rigorous in their examinations and explorations.

Each writer’s style is necessarily different, but the themes in the collection pull their stories together. Women, it is generally agreed, got short shrift in the Andersen and Brothers Grimm retellings of older tales (though there is a shining exception here), and daughters in particular had better watch out, but ultimately these are not feminist re-imaginings. Rather, the writers in The Wilful Eye imbue all of their characters, including the villains, with a deep sense of psychological realism, producing often tender, engaging, and insightful results. Unnamed soldiers and hideous beasts are given a voice, even if that voice is at times unsettling, and wolves are still wolves, however they disguise themselves.