I grew up on fairy tales: Cinderella finding her Prince Charming; Sleeping Beauty being awakened with a kiss; Little Red Riding Hood learning the real reason you should never talk to strangers.
With the recent popularity of of television shows such as Grimm and Once Upon a Time bringing our favorite stories to life in modern settings, fairy tales have become a hot commodity. In these shows, sex and violence are layered over the original story to attract adult watchers—which is, in fact, how fairy tales were originally intended to be written and received.
Historically, fairy tales were extremely dark and quite scandalous. What your parents read to you as a child were clean, violently sanitized versions of what was originally written. Don’t believe me? Find a copy of an original Brothers Grimm fairy tale book published before 1912 or an original copy of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Mermaid.” Trust me, the Little Mermaid did NOT get her HEA in that one. Most of the stories were quite macabre and gruesome. Rape, sadomasochism, and torture ran amok in the earlier versions. It was only after negative reviews (and Disney’s sanitation department got involved) that the stories began to soften, becoming sweeter and moralistic, with sigh-worthy happily ever afters.
As an erotic reader, I find myself fascinated by the interpretations the following authors have incorporated into their offerings. Some use an interesting mix of both the original and the Disney versions to give us stories that are not only interesting but enchantingly erotic in nature.
Anne Rice’s Beauty trilogy series is one of the most infamous erotic fairy tales to date. Not for the occasional erotic reader, this series pushes every boundary and will slam you out of your comfort zone. Based on the tale of “Sleeping Beauty,” our Beauty is “awakened” by being deflowered, and her Prince Charming takes her to his kingdom where hundreds of princes and princesses are sent to learn the art of submission and sexual obedience through the most degrading and humiliation of experiences. No subject or act is considered taboo in here. Each book follows Beauty’s training experiences. It is said that Anne Rice stopped the series when she was shown true BDSM situations based on her books.
Selena Kitt writes a series of erotic stories, each based on a fairy tale. From Alice in Wonderland’s surrender to complete submission to Cinderella, safe-cracker extraordinaire, Ms. Kitt creates wonderfully modern, funny, sexy, and well-written tales with hints of mystery and drama.
Want an anthology mix to wet your whistle? Mitzi Szereto’s Erotic Fairy Tales: A Romp Through the Classics include 15 tales of sexual titillation based on historical fairy tales. Here the bawdy humor of French fable meets the sublime eroticism of ancient Chinese myth; a not-so-virgin damsel weds a Prince Charming with a shoe fetish; Little Red Riding Hood discovers Grandma’s bed is open to any stray wolf; and a Japanese monk stumbles onto an S/M scene behind a forbidden door. Each tale is prefaced by a brief introduction telling its history and the sexual culture in which the work was originally composed
In Deanna Wadsworth’s hilarious erotic story “Red Riding Hood,” you never know what might happen on the way to Grandmother’s house! Red’s grandmother gives her a red riding cloak that evokes all sorts of delicious desires. Red decides to use her Tuesday walks to dear old Grandmother’s as an opportunity to sample all of the delights the local men have to offer, but Red is not aware that two magical creatures have taken a special interest in her naughty escapades or that true pleasure just might be found at the hand of a master in wolf’s clothing!
Shiloh Walker takes a walk on the dark wild side with her Grimm Circle series. The Grimm are a group of immortals, each sacrificing their own lives to protect the world from evil. To explain their presence to the mortal world, their lives are interwoven with fact and fiction to eventually become the fairy tales we have come to love. In each story, our dark Grimms work hard to forget the past and learn to love again.
In the erotic Cinderella Unmasked by Bonnie Dee and Marie Treanor, we learn what happened after Cinderella got her man—turns out, he decided to come out of the closet and went on a 15-year “self-discovery voyage” on the pirate ship. Cinderella is heartbroken, overworked, and frustrated. Her fairy godmother, with help from a few friends, shows Cinderella that passion and forgiveness are but a dance away.
Bet you never thought “Rumpelstiltskin” could be sexy! Leila Bryce Sin takes the spinning-gold-into-straw story one step further in her erotic fairy tale novella Rumpelstilskin, when Rumpelstiltskin asks more a little more then our heroine’s first born child. Oh, no. Our hero wants some instant gratification for his services. Ms. Sin has several novellas, each one offering a decidedly erotic twist to a fairy tale of days past.
Interested in some gay m/m erotic fairy tales? Bedknobs and Broomsticks is a nine-story anthology that offers both seduction and laghter. There’s a magic cock ring that grows into a mighty peenstalk, an unhappy shepherd meest the sexiest wolf imaginable, a Japanese youth with the strength of a bear finds himself weak in the face of a beautiful samurai, and a young man in a ball gown can charm a prince to distraction. These are but a few of the adventures that await you, once upon a time!
I leave you with one last one that while isn’t erotic in the true sense of the word, but it is romantic, funny, and so downright adorable I can’t help but encourage everyone to read it: Nadia Lee’s novella “A Happily Ever After of Her Own.” Melinda Lightfoot, a preschool teacher with an unusual ability to flit in and out of fairy tales, never thought she would get into trouble...until the Fairy Tale Police arrest her while she is in “Beauty and the Beast.” They offer her a deal: Find Beauty, who left the story when Melinda trespassed into it, or be charged with the ultimate crime—Fairy Tale Killer. If that’s not bad enough, the Beast tags along in search of his true love, and Melinda starts falling for the fairy tale prince. She must choose between doing the right thing and having her own happily ever after.
So tell me, what fairy tale has you imagining and wanting a more seductive and sexual ending than what you originally read?
Tori Benson, Smexybooks and at Twitter.
