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INTRODUCTION

ALISON LITTLEWOOD

Seven years later ... it’s a period of time with a suitably fairy tale ring to it. It is appropriate, then, that this is the time when Paul Kane has revisited RED, his dark and twisted take on Little Red Riding Hood of 2008, and produced his sequel, Blood RED.

Fairy tales have been told down the centuries, changing and adapting to meet the age in which they happen to find themselves. Once upon a time they were told around the fire, and the dangers they spoke of were real: real forests in which to become lost, real wolves to tear out your throat. Little Red is cast into that dangerous world, and she needs her wits about her, should she stray from the path.

Later, when gatherers of folklore began to write them down, fairy tales began to be used in new ways. Charles Perrault added his own ‘moral’ as a postscript to Little Red, reconfiguring it as a lesson: listen to your mother or suffer the consequences. His version became an instructional tale for aristocratic youngsters, and the character of Little Red was weakened as a result, no longer using her own cunning to face the dangers of the world but learning the hard way to do what she’s told.

Fairy tales have a way of adapting. It’s how they endure. Handed down from mouth to mouth, once passed on by old matrons and itinerant traders and other storytellers, they have escaped into the wild, no longer in one form but in many. Still, they appeal to the essential fears and concerns within us: fears of the unknown, of falling into darkness, of being brutalised.

Paul Kane’s version of Little Red is a more than fitting adaptation for a modern world. A concrete jungle takes the place of the forest. The danger from the human beasts found within are all too recognisable; our newspaper headlines are full of it. It can strike indiscriminately and without warning. Bad things can happen to good people, whether they’ve strayed from the path or not.

In a world without the simple morality of Perrault or the Grimms, nothing is as it appears. The beast could be anyone; it could even reside within. The world Kane creates is complex. It has shades of grey as well as black and white, and the same is true of his characters. They are no simple types; they have layers and depth, which makes the horror into which they are cast all the more frightening. His adaptation is thoroughly modern and suitably dangerous, and our ability to find the right path is ever more uncertain.

I adored fairy tales as a small child, and I enjoyed reading Blood RED. Whilst being modern, it keeps returning in new and apt ways to the early version we know from the nursery, paying its dues while reinterpreting the tale in ways that will give you the shivers. And Kane is adept at putting flesh on the bones: all the more horrifying, my dear, when he strips it off again.

Alison Littlewood

South Yorkshire

April 2015