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E very reader has at least once in their life read a story that began with those four powerful words…

Once upon a time… Those words hold the power to change our lives, to inspire us, to teach us a lesson, to offer a portal to a world where we can, for a brief time escape the ever present pressures of our current reality.

If you’re like me, you get goosebumps the moment you hear a voice slowly, deeply breath out those words Once upon a time… And you know in most cases that the story will probably end with And they all lived happily ever after…

These words are so powerful that romance became a genre built entirely around that beautiful promise of a happy ending for people dwelling within the worlds of those stories.

And for me, the best part of romance is finding a way to retell a fairy tale or a popular story in our modern world that has in a way become a fairy tale.

If we look to pop culture, many stories have become iconic and are fast on their way to being identified as what I consider modern day fairy tales.

If you approach younger readers who grew up when these immensely popular stories were already out for several decades, there is now a built in awareness for this younger generation of these stories on an almost mythic scale.

Take for example Star Wars, or even Indiana Jones and maybe even Back to the Future.

These are modern movies that released in the last thirty or so years but they have become legendary stories to audiences.

Harry Potter is another great example. These stories will outlast many of the other stories that came out at the same time.

These stories are built…different. There is something about them, something epic that leaves us breathlessly wanting to return to that world again and again.

For me, the 1986 movie Labyrinth was one of those movies, and I know based on the internet posts and social media engagement that I am not alone in my complete obsession with Sarah’s battle through the Labyrinth and the enigmatic Goblin King Jareth.

I’ve found an immense pleasure in being able to take elements of these modern fairy tales and recreate a new but hopefully inspired story that will speak to a more adult audience while still capturing that fantastical adventure of first love.

A brief history of fairy tales…

In another life, I was a history and political science major.

Research is in my blood and bones. So naturally, when I turned my mind to writing The Lord of the Labyrinth I wanted to get my fairy facts straight and my mythology figured out.

For copyright reasons and for my own enjoyment of creating something new, I didn’t want to copy the movie.

I wanted this story to be a tribute to the movie.

With that goal in mind, I knew I wanted to build a fairy kingdom that was more in line with true fairy mythology so I turned my research towards fairy lore and its history.

No one is quite certain where fairy tales first originated.

Many scholars believe that these stories came from oral traditions dating back thousands of years.

And arguably the first mythologies about gods and goddesses in ancient societies like Greece and Rome were essentially fairy tales.

They featured gods, monsters, wild lands, and mortals tossed into adventures in those elements.

As the oral tradition of fairy tales progressed into written forms, there was a societal division with regard to whether fairy tales were for poor peasants to tell around the hearth at night, or if they were stories to be relegated to the Victorian nurseries.

Perhaps only in the last seventy-five years has this division weakened and fairy tales have once more become acceptable across all classes and all elements of society.

There are still critics who argue that literary fairy tales are too sentimental, kitsch or escapist, to which I would argue, is exactly the point of reading them.

Many people lose their love of reading in their high school or college years when they are required to read texts that are dry, boring, uninspiring or banal.

They forget that they can simply walk into a bookstore, a library or even pick up their phone and access a story that is worth reading simply for their own pleasure.

The power of fairy tales is that they are exactly that, an escape for all of us, from whatever we need escaping from. That is a fairy tale’s truest power.

When you turn the page of a fairy tale, you know you will be encountering a fantastic world, possibly a supernatural one, it may be whimsical or dark, it may be playful or simply wondrously strange, but it will be worth reading.

These tales will be some of the most entertaining, astonishing, or inspiring stories that have ever been dreamt up by writers.

Some fairy tales will offer political arguments that relate to the age and area in which they were first written, some will tackle the balance between cultural concerns and advancing economics of an ever changing world.

But the way these stories are written, these issues are handled delicately within the framework of the story itself so as to still remain enjoyable while imparting a message to the reader.

What do fairies have to do with fairy stories?

As has been pointed out by literary scholars, most fairy tales or fairy stories do not include actual fairies as we think of them, with little tiny shimmery bodies, wings and often reckless behaviors.

We think of fairies like Tinkerbell from J.M.

Barrie’s Peter Pan but those are not the fairies which originally were dreamt up in the oldest stories we know.

The Seelie and Unseelie Courts and the Sidhe lore are particularly striking in this regard because the Sidhe species of fairy creature are considered to be far taller than humans and yet they look human.

There is no mention of pointed ears, and not all of them are blond and beautiful, although most are described to be beautiful and captivating.

So where did fairies began to fit into our sense of fairy tales?

I believe that like with ghosts within horror stories or spooky stories, fairies as creatures became a sort of mascot for the genre of fairy tales.

Many of the now more obscure tales in fairy tale collections do not contain fairies in the traditional sense, but may possess fantastical creatures.

However, the more popular stories, like those of the Brothers Grimm include fairies as prominent characters.

What is it about fairies that attract us?

C.S. Lewis that fairies brought out an overarching medieval picture of the world with a wonderful element of mystery to it.

Fairies were creatures who could be defined by several categories all at once, yet they defied being pigeon-holed into box or another.

Sometimes they were good, sometimes they were evil, and always they seemed to come as emissaries to us from a wilder, more fantastical world than our own.

The birth of the modern fairy like the Tinkerbell sort of fairy within fairy tales began in the Victorian era where the folklore of old transcended into a true literary art form.

The writers of this golden age of fairy tales saw themselves as bringing readers back to their childhoods, back to their ancient roots of those oral traditions, albeit with a touch more wonder and magic infused within their words, than the old stories.

It was clear that these Victorian writers were in love with the idea of these ‘other worlds’ and the stories that could be told within them for not just children but adult audiences as well.

At the height of Industrialism, with coal residue coating much of England, and children workers in factories as business men pushed for the economic advancement of England, fairy tales grew in importance for audiences.

As if driven by the need to combat their very opposite nature, these fairy tales, which had existed long before technology, and likely will exist after all technology is gone, remain the way for all of us, to travel back childhood, to connect with nature and magic again on a soul deep level that has been inherit in human nature for thousands of years.

These stories have the power to teach, to provide children with their first discoveries of intertextuality. These stories are known, loved, and even when mocked by others who have forgotten the way back to magic, they stand strong and tall in our literary traditions.

J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the famous Lord of the Rings series even penned and performed an essay famously titled ‘On Fairy Stories’ where he said that there is no necessary connection between the child and the fairy tale.

What he means is that these stories are for any audience, not just necessarily children.

Simply because the stories involve child-like trust, open-heartedness and wonder that often fill a child’s mind, it does not mean that these are not worthy feelings to be embraced by adults.

In an age where we are judged for everything we do, everything we post, everything we wear, read or even listen to, there has been a grassroots movement to defend what you love to read and make no apologies.

That to me is one of the gifts of fairy tales.

Now, if you tell someone that you love fairy tale retelling romance novels, no one will judge you, in fact you find you might make a new friend with similar interests.

We don’t have to leave the wonder and beauty of childhood behind, thanks to the everlasting magic of fairy tales.

These stories provide us a way to connect once more with the ‘wild’ within us.

The ancient magic of believing in something mysterious, unexplainable and beautiful.

Reading fairy tales is a lot like falling in love.

I can’t imagine anything more perfect than romance novels that have a fairy tale feel to them because it’s like falling in love twice.

I hope you enjoyed my little journey into fairy tales and I hope that Roan and Kate let you feel that magic of falling in love both with them and with fairy tales.