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Review

The subgenre of fairy tales gets a new slant---and a literal modern meaning---in William Holden’s often clever A Twist of Grimm. He has selected several of the tales collected by the German Brothers Grimm in the 19th century and added his own spin to them as described in the cover’s catchphrase Erotic Fairy Tales for Gay Men. Where the reader may have been used to beautiful princesses pining after their true loves, there are instead handsome (and hunky) princes looking for their dream men---and almost always finding them. It is not only royals who find their loves, and sometimes lose them, but peasants and shopkeepers as well. The original tales that Holden has transmogrified with his own gay sensibility are not the universally well known ones such as Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel or Rumpelstilskin. They are instead lesser known stories like The Crystal Ball, The Three Green Twigs, and Fitcher’s Bird which he has renamed The Maiden and the Mirror, The Penance of Three, and The Forbidden Room respectively. Especially literal treatment is awarded to Grimm’s already gay-evocative The Singing Bone, which is here graphically re-titled The Flaccid Cock That Sang. You will know these are not the fairy tales of your youth when you come across the sex acts that are liberally described and sprinkled throughout. Although not all the recast fairy tales are successful, the majority are fun to read and often wittily written.

 -- Roy Liebman