Little Red

Well, I hoped you enjoyed that as much as I enjoyed writing it. There are just a few little points and oddments that I wanted to add about this story, but I’m sure they don’t really add anything to the plot, so don’t feel you have to read on if you don’t want to.

The reason I decided to write this is because, for a long time, I’ve enjoyed the dark side of fairy stories. Those safe little tales we grow up on are rarely much to do with the originals; the very first version of Little Red Riding Hood was a warning to children against the perils of talking to strangers, with the little girl ending her days in the wolf’s belly. Little details like this, and say, Snow White forcing her wicked stepmother to wear red hot metal shoes and dance until she died of exhaustion, or Sleeping Beauty waking up to find herself heavily pregnant after being raped while she was asleep, are for some peculiar reason left out of most children’s picture books. Little Red Riding Hood was always a favourite though. I remember reading something about it in a textbook on literary criticism years ago, to do with erotic undertones and all that business, about how the different aspects of carnality, lust for flesh as food and lust for flesh as sexual fulfilment, can get all mixed up in such stories, and it struck a cord with me. Recently, reading an excellent book of ‘twisted’ fairy tales (more on that later) the idea popped back into my mind and I decided to take a shot at writing this. So there you have it.

My original idea for the story was actually rather darker than what turned out here. My first draft had the wolf creature rape Red at that first encounter in his Gramma’s house. Red went into total denial and went home, then came back a month later to visit again having blocked out everything that had happened, and saw the stranger in the diner. He followed him, hoping to proposition him, and saw him transform, then they had sex out in the woods. While I quite liked this idea, once the characters were put together I couldn’t quite make it fit, and I’ve always been a sucker for romance, so it ended up being a little gentler and cuddlier.

Regarding a few cultural details; you may have surmised from the tone of my writing that I am English (I’m told it’s obvious). And yes, Little Red is set somewhere in North America. Why I did this, I don’t know, but it’s probably mostly due to the fact that, when I came to think about writing this, Red popped into my head fully formed, chattering away, and sounding exactly like Michael Shanks, accent and all, so he ended up an American and so did the rest of it. If anyone spots any huge blunders I’ve made in the setting, please let me know.

I had a good long think over the names of places and characters for this story; you wouldn’t believe how long it took me to decide to call Red ‘Red’. To start with, Denebrook is the name of a big, old Victorian mansion near where I used to live and I always liked the sound of it. The house was very beautiful too, despite the modern trappings that had been attached to it when it was turned into a doctor’s surgery.

Hobart’s Field is a combination of my affection for quaint sounding villages and the fact that I was reading a comic with a character called Hobart in around the time I started thinking about this story.

Red’s real name, Rufus (as seen on his driving license in chapter 1) actually means ‘Red-headed’ and is a Latin name.

Alexander is a Greek name and means defender, or helper. I liked this because I had some idea about writing more stories about these two, based around other fairy tales with the big bad wolf in, in which Alex acts as a sort of reluctant protector of the village (poor guy, he just wants a quite life with his pookie, Red!) I don’t know yet if I want to do this or not, but if you have any arguments for or against, please drop me a line via reviews.

Gramma was called Louise purely because it sounded nice with the surname, Brennard. It's the female form of Louis, which in turn is the latinised form of Ludwig, which means famous warrior, but I don't think that meaning really suits her.

Her gossipy friend Rhonda’s name means ‘noisy’ and is thought by most etymologists to be of Welsh origin.

I chose the names Ron and Ronnie for the couple who run the diner on a whim. Ronald means ‘advisor’ or ‘ruler’, though I’d lean towards the former as he has something to say about everything. Veronica means ‘bringer of victory’, but I picked her name mostly because Ron’s was already in place, rather than for its own meaning. Helene Cixous would kill me.

David means beloved, but I didn’t choose that name for any particular meaning, I just went through common male names until I found one that sounded good prefixed with ‘trooper’.

If you liked this, you may like a few of the books that I read to inspire me. I can really recommend The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, a collection of short stories based on various fairy tales (as mentioned above) including two very creepy versions of Little Red Riding Hood. I also liked The Big Book of Grimm edited by Jonathan Vankin, as it makes every effort to get to the very original versions of each tale, including some really esoteric ones. There is also an excellent short story by Neil Gaiman called Snow, Glass, Apples, based on Snow White – amazingly creepy! I think it was most recently published in a volume called Smoke and Mirrors.

So there you have it. Thank you for reading Little Red. I really hope that I haven’t damaged your childhood memories of story time in any way. (p.s. thank you to all the people who left comments during the writing of this. They were really encouraging, even though I lost some of them after I realised I had put the story in the wrong section of the website and had to move it!)