Here's a tempting idea that I'm surprised hasn't been tackled before, at least as far as I'm aware. It's the time-honoured folk story of Cinderella (previously known as Cendrillon, Rhodopis, Ye Xian and a host of others), but told as a horror story by one of her ugly sisters. I'm not surprised to see this now, in an age of horror movies plundering new entries into the public domain with almost as much shamelessness as Walt Disney did during the past century. However, Gorman didn't go quite where I thought she might and that's mostly a good thing.

I should mention immediately that this is going to play best to readers who aren't steadfastly set on their personal beliefs about how stories should be told. This is happily horror rather than dark fairy tale, which it could easily have been, but it's also told in two different ways that are unlikely companions. It feels like a period piece, Victorian or even earlier, because of the adherence of the characters to deportment, social mores and expected behaviour. Safety is, therefore, always a little less crucial than what the neighbours might think. However, it's told in modern style, contractions everywhere, rather than in the flowery language and convoluted sentence structure of the era.

Also, it feels extremely visual, as if it started out as or is intended to become a screenplay. While I have aphantasia and so can't see images in my head, I can feel when something clicks visually and this clearly plays out like a movie. Each scene is well-framed, visually striking and with just a little more added to the mythos that's unfolding. Cinderella in her room in the cellar reminded me very much of Hannibal Lector in his cell in 'The Silence of the Lambs', however different the furnishings. And, of course, like Lector, Cinderella eventually escapes because Gorman can't diverge too far in her reimaginings of an existing story.

Initially, everything's new because it's the setup we never see in the many tellings of 'Cinderella'. Here, Bettina is a widow, very well-connected socially, with two daughters, Eunice and Hortense, eleven and five respectively. They live in a spacious manor house, but the loss of her husband has led her to lay off most of the servants and sell whatever she can just to keep it. Marriage to a rich man, Mr. Fitzwilliam, only a nouveau riche merchant but riche nonetheless, will solve that. He's a widower and he soon moves in with his daughter, Cinderella, who's twelve. And, of course, that's when the horror kicks in.

The conceit here is that history is written by winners and Cinderella is so fundamentally a winner that she's given her name to a particular type of winner, a Cinderella story nowadays meaning an underdog who wins out despite all the odds. So she was the poor beautiful victim of the torments visited upon her by a wicked stepmother and her ugly jealous stepsisters and that's all we know. In this version, she's the monster and everyone else is merely trying to survive the clear and present danger that she constitutes to their family and the world at large.

And, by monster, I do mean monster. For all the curtseying and thinking about the Joneses, she's a bona fide body horror monster. I can't really spoil what she is because I couldn't tell you if I wanted to. Mr. Fitzwilliam suggests early on that his wife through an arranged marriage could have been Fae or a Cold One or just a cursed human woman, but she died giving birth to Cinderella so it's all conjecture. There's a lot to suggest Fae, there are scenes later on that hint at demon and a whole lot in between that conjure up Lovecraftian comparisons. Maybe she's a minor elder god or spawn of their line.

What matters is that she has powers, but also some restrictions, and we learn about these early, because it's the only way that Bettina and her children can learn to survive with her nearby. She's compelled to obey the commands of family, making it crucial that Bettina and Adrian marry soon and that the girls loudly proclaim their sisterhood to Cinderella. She can reanimate small animals like rats and mice and bend their corpses to her will, so Eunice brings stray cats home to keep the vermin to a minimum. And she's at the peak of her powers between midnight and 3am when she's unable to hide who she is. And so rules are decreed to keep her confined and them safe.

What follows is cleverly shoehorned (ha!) into the fairy tale framework that Gorman is held to for the duration. We know going in that Prince Charming, here called Credence, is going to become of eligible age to marry, grand balls will be held at the palace to introduce eligible ladies to him and he'll fall for one who vanishes at the stroke of midnight, leaving only a glass slipper, prompting a search of the land that will eventually turn up Cinderella. All that happens here, but with a wildly different tone to the fairy tale. For instance, she's breathtakingly beautiful but not naturally so. After all, if you were a shapechanger, would you make yourself ugly?

The ending isn't the bloodbath that it could have been but it isn't the happy ending decreed by a few centuries of fairy tales either. There are clumsily overt hints early on that I feared would be a weak way to end, but they're dealt with soon enough that they don't cause that sort of problem. In the end, I found myself surprised by some of the directions Gorman took her story, which made me very happy indeed. I was also happy about how she did that and where she went to do so; but some may find this a little much at points.

I'm talking here about gruesome scenes. It would be very easy to pick this up and assume that it's a dark fairy tale, but it goes far beyond that. This is horror and in at least one scene it reaches full-on extreme horror. In a host of others, Cinderella relishes being a tentacled eldritch nightmare of the sort that Richard Upton Pickman would paint. As a movie, it wouldn't be out of place for it to be directed by David Cronenberg with the Cinderella creature created through physical effects by Screaming Mad George of Society fame.

I did have a few minor quibbles but nothing of much substance. The question of what Cinderella is never reaches any sort of resolution and I'd have liked that. For all the Lovecraftian body horror, I was also reminded of the cuckoos in Seanan McGuire's 'Incryptid' series as well as Fae and demon lore. There's magic here, because Cinderella arrives at the manor house in a warded carriage and there are mages at the palace, but that angle is largely ignored and I had to wonder where those mages were during the finalé.

So I'd have liked more, but I thoroughly enjoyed what I got. However, I'm a fan of books unafraid to genre-hop and so this plays a lot more naturally to me than it might to others. There's a dichotomy between the period setting and the modern horror aesthetic that may well prompt some to quit and others to expect a mashup mindset, but Gorman plays it all with deadly seriousness, unlike an overt mashup like 'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter', which pretends to be serious but knows how camp it is and so keeps its tongue firmly in its cheek.

Hopefully that gives you enough to tell you whether this is for you or not. It's definitely for me and I'll be looking forward to whatever W. R. Gorman writes next. ~~ Hal C F Astell