thefourthvine's Reviews > The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror

I am definitely not the right audience for this book. I read this on easy mode, skipping two stories that were mostly about animals (and I should have skipped the third, but I didn’t realize in time), and the book still left me feeling slimed and poked in bruised places. It’s just grim, unrelentingly grim, unrelentingly saying, “Hey, did you know there are awful things in the world? There are! And they are so very, very awful.” Many of the stories cover the same (grim) territory, and some of them have no resolution, and I finished most of them sort of regretting I’d read them. (The two exceptions were “Daughter Cells” and “The Six Boy-Coffins.”)

I do like fairytale fic, and that’s what these stories are, but I don’t like one-note stories, let alone one-note collections — and I really don’t like it when that one note is a long, sustained moan of pain. I think I might have liked at least half of these stories if I’d encountered them mixed with other kinds of stories, or on their own, but all together they were at least 12 times too much.

But! If you like grimdark and you like fairytales, this is definitely the collection for you. It’s just so very very much not for me.