What IS this kind of book, anyway? It’s not simply a book written about games or gaming. (I have some posts about that, if you’re interested.) It’s a novel where the main action consists of leveling up (as in an mmorpg or a Dungeons and Dragons game) using “stats”–shorthand descriptions of the powers and skills the characters wield. Is LitRPG interesting at all to non-gamers? I’m not sure it is.
But I play mmorpgs, so I found my first steps into this type of book to be pretty fascinating. I must admit, I read excerpts of some of the first of these (Russian and South Korean, mostly), and I found them drab. Why read about it when you can DO it? Here’s an interesting post explaining the whole phenomenon, from the beginnings of the craze–and actually, the Wikipedia article is quite good, especially the bibliography at the end of the article. Go there if you want to do a much deeper dive into LitRPG than my post is giving you here.
So. . . I had never tried one of these books. Then a gamer buddy of mine (thanks, James!), and ANOTHER buddy (thanks, J.R!) recommended the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, by indie author Matt Dinniman, and I was hooked. I’ve read the first one. Now I’m deep into the second.
Find it on Amazon, as well as other places ebooks are sold. I put a humongous version of the cover here so you can check out Carl’s (non) pants.
Early thoughts: These books are indeed about “leveling up.” They are indeed about “stats.” But they are hilarious. When Earth attracts the attention of an intergalactic tv-ish production broadcasting the gruesome deaths of millions to an audience of gazillions, Carl, the narrator, finds himself suddenly thrust into a dangerous game with multiple levels to survive. Unfortunately for Carl (actually–mini-spoiler–fortunately for Carl), the sudden game-apocalypse arrives when he is outside in the middle of the night rescuing a treed cat, and without his pants. Pantsless Carl is a recurring funny trope of the novel. And the cat, Princess Donut, is the novel’s co-protagonist. Both are great characters, and anyone who has ever played one of these games will wince in sympathy as they dash out of one peril straight into another, always striving to reach that next, uberer level.
I don’t know if all LitRPG is this amusing, but if it is, I’m a fan. Guess I’ll find out.
I should say this: Once, I was part of a Goodreads group of speculative fiction fans. We’d decide on a book, read it, and post our thoughts. I discovered something really interesting. The posts were all apples and oranges. Some people read the books–as in, through their eyeballs. Others processed the same words, but through a different organ, their ears. Reader-readers and audiobook readers are two entirely different animals. (“Can be two entirely different animals”? I may be overstating it.) An audiobook reader will frequently focus on the production values of the audiobook and the skill of the narrator as much as on the skill of the writer who penned the words–often more on those aspects. It strikes me that a lot of consumers of LitRPG will be audiobook consumers, maybe a higher proportion than in other subgenres of speculative fiction. This is only a hunch. I’d love to have data to back it up. Anyway. . .a long wind-up to my point. I, an eyeballs-reader, loved Dungeon Crawler Carl. Not sure about one of my two gamer-friends who also loved it, but the other is a mostly-ears man. He says the narrator is just great. I wouldn’t know, but if you too are a consumer of audiobooks, here’s an endorsement from someone who does know.
And another thing: The Dungeon Crawler Carl books have been criticized for their callous violence. Geez. Get a grip. That’s what these games are all about. Don’t like it? Don’t read it/play it. No one’s holding a gun to your head and making you. . .except. . .shhhh. . . that really fugly goblin, just around the corner? Is that a gun it’s holding? A big gun, too, aiming right at your head. But you have +10 Strength and +8 Agility. You can take him!
Ok. Seriously. The author of these books can write. I like that in a novel. It’s my favorite stat. I also want to make a cat toon on my mmorpg and name her Princess Donut.
This year, DANCE your way to Valentine’s Day! Novels based on fairytales and folktales featuring dance.
In preceding years (you can find all the posts archived on my blog, btw–just look for February!), I have posted novels based on worldwide fairytales and folk tales, and on two “literary” fairytales (Cinderella and Rapunzel). This year, I’m featuring a whole week of novels based on fairytales and folktales involving dance. Here are the posts:
Day One of Fairytale Fantasy Week: Entwined, by Heather Dixon–a novel based on the classic fairytale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” Find the review here.
Day Two: Midnight in Everwood, by M. A. Kuzniar–a novel based on the story behind the classic fairytale ballet, The Nutcracker. Find the review here.
Day Three: Valentine’s Day itself! The amazing fantasy novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke–a novel with a strong dancing subplot. ONE OF MY TWO FAVORITES. Find the review here.
Day Four: House of Salt and Sorrows, by Erin A. Craig–another novel based on “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” Find the review here.
Day Five: Dark Breaks the Dawn, by Sara B. Larson–a novel based on the fairytale ballet Swan Lake. Find the review here.
Day Six: Sexing the Cherry, by Jeanette Winterson–a final choice based on “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” but be warned–it’s nothing like the others. ONE OF MY TWO FAVORITES. To see the review, go here.
TODAY, Day Seven: A wrap-up and a discussion of the “dance mania” or “dance plagues” that swept medieval Europe. These episodes are behind some of the era’s most interesting folklore, including fairytales we still enjoy. (and a free download of my Pied Piper-inspired story, if you want to read it.)
THE WRAP-UP:
As I explored fairytale fantasy novels using dance as a theme, these were my two main takeaways:
The fairytale usually called “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” is an especially powerful inspiration for these novels.
Other novels of fairytale fantasy take the stories behind several well-known ballets for inspiration–sort of a no-brainer if you’re looking to combine fairytale fantasy and dance. And this is also not a surprise: most of the ballets were choreographed to the music of Tchaikovsky, who may be most famous for his fairytale-themed ballets.
Of the six novels I reviewed, my two favorites share a crossover appeal for readers of “literary” fiction. That’s no accident, since I am one of those readers. I also really love good genre fiction–but it has to be good (in the writing, the overall conception of the story, and the way it presents itself to readers) for me to like it. THIS MAY NOT BE YOUR EXPERIENCE. Plenty of readers who love fairytale fantasy want the full-bore genre reading experience, akin in the world of books to opening a big luscious box of chocolates and digging in. Hey, I love that, too! I also love other types of reading experiences.
Full disclosure about that last item. I’m a retired English prof. So I WOULD be like that, right? But I crave immersing myself in an amazing alternate world, so I love all types of books (and other media) that do that for me. And, like all readers, I have my prejudices (such as hating cliff-hanger endings).
Here’s another important matter: I love reading books, talking about books, even analyzing books (which–if you’re not careful–can spoil the pleasure. “We murder to dissect.”). WRITING books is another thing entirely. I do that, too, and I never underestimate how hard that is. I’m in awe of all six of the authors of the books I’ve posted about in this blog series. I think of myself as a good reader. I TRY to be a good writer, and how well I succeed. . . that’s up for grabs.
On to the fascinating topic of WHY we love fairytales (folk tales) and therefore why, if we love reading fantasy, fairytale fantasy might especially speak to us.
Because my theme this year has been dance, I concentrated in this series of blog posts on folklore about dance and how it transforms into fairytale magic. Here are two important pieces of dance-related folklore, one well-known and one pretty obscure:
The Sur La Lune website has posted a detailed discussion of the Brothers Grimm version of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” also known as “The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces,” and comments on several others. I won’t duplicate the fine work of that web site, but I’ll direct you over there. If you’re fascinated by fairytales, this site is a wonderful resource.
That great resource Wikipedia gives an extremely helpful list of the many versions world-wide of this fairytale.* And as I’ve already mentioned, entering something like “novels based on The Twelve Dancing Princesses” into your favorite search engine will lead you to many lists of great books to read. I found it a real struggle to narrow this blog’s investigation to six novels.
The second, much less well-known folk tale is the German tale “The Dancers,” or more often, “The Cursed Dancers of Ramsdorf.” It tells of an angry abbot who upbraids his parishioners because they dance on the Sabbath, profaning the holy day. When they won’t clean up their act, the abbot curses the sinful villagers to “dance for a year and a day.” The hapless villagers begin to dance. After dancing through the year and a day of the abbot’s curse, they discover they can’t stop. For years they dance, before finally dropping down exhausted. They spend the rest of their lives in a state of hopeless lethargy. So there, profane dancers.
This tale is related to–or maybe the same tale as–“The Cursed Dancers of Colbeck,” which is known from an early fourteenth century English “exemplum” or cautionary tale about the consequences of disrespecting the Sabbath. (It’s apparently part of an text transmitted by Robert Mannyng, maybe derived from an even earlier mid-thirteenth century text by William of Waddington, but I’d have to go to a university library to find out more). If this exemplum is the origin of the “Dancers of Ramersdorf” tale, that tale wouldn’t be a true folk tale, I guess, but a folk derivation from a literary source. Maybe it’s the reverse! Any folklorists who know about this, please comment! There are some real similarities with some versions of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” too, in which the princesses are cursed to dance.
Whatever scholars find out about these tales, I see some interesting connections between “The Cursed Dancers of Ramsdorf” and the medieval phenomenon known as “dancing mania,” or “the dance plagues.” Whole towns and villages were caught up in an hysteria that led them to dance to exhaustion and then, supposedly, to death. Many scholars have speculated on the causes, everything from food poisoning to diseases such as epilepsy to mass hysteria. Here is a good account of modern scholars’ thinking about the phenomenon.
Pilgrimage of the Epileptics to the Church at Molenbeek (aka “The Dance at Molenbeek”), thought to be a depiction of victims of “dancing mania” or the “dancing plagues” that swept medieval Europe. Painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564–1638). Image source: Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain.
“The Cursed Dancers of Ramsdorf”–and the dance mania–also seems to intersect neatly with other folkloric depictions of dance in the European Middle Ages, mainly visual, that are associated with the Black Plague, the epidemic of bubonic plague that swept Europe most notably in 1346-1353, killing a third to a half of the European population and causing widespread social disruption. Bubonic plague returned multiple times, doing even more damage. (By comparison, think of the social disruptions caused by the recent covid-19 pandemic, multiply that many times, and add in ignorance of the causes of disease in a pre-scientific age, almost no effective medical remedies, and widespread fear and panic. . .hmm, not sounding so different after all.) Drastic social disruptions give rise to stories, games, songs, common if unsubstantiated beliefs, particular objects–folklore, in other words. In our day, such cultural phenomena are frequently not passed down generation to generation by word of mouth, as in traditional folklore, so in technologically advanced societies, we might use the term “urban myth” or “popular culture” instead.
This article sums up the connection between the “dancing mania” and “dancing plagues” of the medieval period in Europe and the Black Death epidemics sweeping Europe around the same time.
The mass deaths of the Black Plague and other medieval outbreaks of bubonic plague had a profound effect on the way people thought about death. One reaction was to see death as a “great leveler.” High and low, rich or poor, it didn’t matter. The plague took you and killed you. The visual arts depicted these anxieties through the “dance of death” or “danse macabre,” a skeleton representing Death leading a line of people of all sorts and stations through a grisly dance–and through visual art that served as mementi mori (mementos, or reminders of death)–not only paintings and etchings, but even skulls set in the midst of fancy banquet tables to remind everyone, “from dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return.” Our society tends to hush up and lock away this reality of the human condition, but in the plague years, death and its terrible sights and sounds and smells were all too evident.
Because I can’t resist. . .
For my own purposes as a writer, I couldn’t help but be struck with the similarities of these dance tales and images with another very well-known folk tale, the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Although the main focus is on music, the idea of marching people off to death, or to some horrifying unknown fate, seems connected to the dance plagues. The Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s famous twentieth-century film The Seventh Seal provides a great image of the Dance of Death, for example, especially the way Death leads the dead off in a macabre dancing row to their fate. Here’s the link.
The Pied Piper in the folk tale may present a similar image of death. This article sums that idea up nicely. In the tale, a piper (bard) is hired to rid the town of rats. When the town fathers cheat him of his fee, the Pied Piper leads their children off, and they’re never seen again. Here is a good account of the tale and the possible reasons behind it. Two things fascinate me about the Pied Piper tale: first, the backdrop of the tale, during the time of the Black Death, bubonic plague caused by rats. Read about it here. Second, the connection of the plague with rats and with bards. Read here about why bards were often considered so dangerous, and how the Pied Piper story connects with the superstitions about bards, especially the idea that bards were able to rhyme and sing rats away from towns and crops—a kind of musical pest-control service.
A SIDE NOTE: I should mention one final item of folklore, the children’s game Ring Around the Rosie (Roud folk song index #7925). As it turns out, this traditional singing-dancing-rhyming game has nothing to do with the Black Death, despite the popular belief. In the twentieth century, many thought it must be connected. You still see people asserting this. Until I looked into it myself, I thought so, too. In spite of some seemingly convincing arguments about sounds in the Ring Around the Rosie rhyme mimicking sneezing, the “rosy” rash of the plague, the “ashes, ashes” line, and the “all fall down” line, contemporary folklorists mostly reject the Black Plague origins of the rhyme. Read this for an accessible discussion of their thinking.
WHAT DOES THIS FOLKLORE STUFF MEAN FOR US FANTASY READERS, THOUGH?
Fairytales–folk tales–have always been a way for people to come to grips with the human condition. Storytelling itself is a way to do that, maybe the oldest way in the history of humanity. Folk tales like “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” and “The Cursed Dancers of Ramsdorf” are entertainment, but they are also conduits into a deeper understanding of our lives. Perhaps, for us, fairytale fantasy novels perform that function. We can breeze through them in a state of delight. We can look deeper. Our choice.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR ME AS A WRITER? A vast well of fascinating characters and plots and ideas. If you’d like to download a free example loosely based on the Pied Piper folk tale, GO HERE.
* About Wikipedia: no sneering about Wikipedia from this writer! Sure, it has its problems, but so does any general encyclopedia. The best feature of Wikipedia is the way its general discussion provides you with sources to go deeper into a subject. (If you’re a student, just don’t copy straight out of Wikipedia, or even with a few tweaks to the language–both are plagiarism–and do go further than Wikipedia. No general encylopedia should function as a student’s main source. See my avoiding-plagiarism guide here–all the more important in a world already flooded with AI. And by the way–if any students are reading this, DO NOT use this blog as a scholarly source. Because it’s not. Maybe it will lead you to some, though.)
This year, DANCE your way to Valentine’s Day! Novels based on fairytales and folktales featuring dance.
In preceding years (you can find all the posts archived on my blog, btw–just look for February!), I have posted novels based on worldwide fairytales and folk tales, and on two “literary” fairytales (Cinderella and Rapunzel). This year, I’m featuring a whole week of novels based on fairytales and folktales involving dance. Here are the posts:
Day One of Fairytale Fantasy Week: Entwined, by Heather Dixon–a novel based on the classic fairytale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” Find the review here.
Day Two: Midnight in Everwood, by M. A. Kuzniar–a novel based on the story behind the classic fairytale ballet, The Nutcracker. Find the review here.
Day Three: Valentine’s Day itself! The amazing fantasy novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke–a novel with a strong dancing subplot. ONE OF MY TWO FAVORITES. Find the review here.
Day Four: House of Salt and Sorrows, by Erin A. Craig–another novel based on “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” Find the review here.
Day Five: Dark Breaks the Dawn, by Sara B. Larson–a novel based on the fairytale ballet Swan Lake. Find the review here.
TODAY, Day Six: Sexing the Cherry, by Jeanette Winterson–a final choice based on “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” but be warned–it’s nothing like the others. ONE OF MY TWO FAVORITES.
Day Seven: A wrap-up and a special exploration of the “dance mania” of the medieval period, plus a free download.
TODAY, a review of Sexing the Cherry, by Jeanette Winterson
Find it on Amazon, or wherever you like to buy your ebooks, or from bricks and mortar book sellers.
Sexing the Cherry (1989), by Jeanette Winterson, published in the U.K. by Bloomsbury (in the U.S. by Grove Press), is a hard book to label. Is it a novel? A meditation? A long, gorgeous prose poem? It won the E. M. Forster Award, and has been described as magical realism, as post-modernist, as intertexual. The whole of it uses the story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses as a sort of anchor. It’s not your normal fantasy novel, or any type of genre fiction. If you don’t like literary fiction and read to be soothed rather than challenged, maybe skip it. If you want a trip into the marvelous and strange, read it.
The Twelve Dancing Princesses–the tale
First of all, as in years gone by, I should mention what I mean by “fairytale.” No fairies are necessarily involved. The term has evolved to refer to a particular magical type of folk tale that may involve fairies, princesses, and the like, but may not. (A subgenre of fantasy, involving the fae, is an entirely different matter). And sometimes, what readers have come to know as “fairytales” aren’t any such thing–not folklore, passed down anonymously through the generations and centuries, often by word of mouth, but literary creations by artists hoping to mimic the fairytale aura. I should also mention that my blog posts on this subject won’t refer to anything Disney, except in passing. The Disney take on fairytales occurs in a whole world of its own, it has its faithful fans, and I don’t intrude there.
Winterson’s book (notice I don’t say novel!) is the third in this series to use the Twelve Dancing Princesses as a basis. I could have blogged about so many more. I won’t recap the fairytale–you can read that in the earlier posts in my Fairytale Fantasy series. I have to say I’m amazed at how many writers chose this particular fairytale as an inspiration. I expected that of Cinderella (see last year’s blog posts), but this one I never figured for one of the three or four absolutely iconic fairytales for Western readers, so I didn’t expect so many novels based on it. If you love this fairytale, go onto your favorite search engine and marvel at the lists and lists of Twelve-Dancing-Princesses-themed novels. Almost all of them are either fantasy or fanciful romance, or both. I’ve been hearing a new term lately: romantasy. I guess that covers a lot of fairytale fiction pretty well. It just doesn’t cover Winterson’s book.
The magical realism label really does fit it well. What is magical realism, exactly? It’s not fantasy, or any type of genre speculative fiction, but it encompasses the fantastical. The term seems to have been applied first to certain types of writing coming out of Latin America, such as the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but it has also been applied to the works of writers worldwide who blur the lines between realism and a supernatural or magical take on the world. Prominent examples of magical realism written in English might be the novels of Salmon Rushdie (and we see what kind of political trouble he got into for blending the realistic and the magical), or to point to a writer not as well-known, Sarah Perry (Melmoth, The Essex Serpent).
My thoughts on this book:
I love to put an outlier in these fairytale fantasy blog series, and Winterson’s book is definitely that. I found it fascinating, but I was careful not to read it the way I’d read a novel. I took it in slow, bite-sized pieces. There’s a kind of plot, I guess: a monstrous woman known as the Dog Woman adopts a young boy, Jordan, in 17th century England at the time of the English Civil War. The Dog Woman is a slum dweller, and her life and physical presence and practices turn the stomach. If you have a delicate stomach, reader, be warned. She is so gigantic, so hideous, and so commanding that she can stalk around 17th century England doing whatever she pleases, including murder, and no one stops her. She’s the antithesis of the obedient woman.
Jordan, by contrast, is a sensitive soul. He becomes enthralled with the exotic fruits and vegetables appearing even in the slums of London, exhibited as wonders, as the Age of Exploration brings them to England’s shores: pineapples and bananas, especially. Take a look at the original cover for Winterson’s book–it represents the book a lot more accurately than the lovely cover I’ve posted above:
Jordan becomes an assistant to that very intriguing real 17th century personality John Tradescant. His father was gardener to King Charles I (whose execution by adherents of Oliver Cromwell becomes a prominent plot point–using plot very, very loosely). The son spent years in colonial America and other places around the globe, collecting plants and experimenting on new ways to cultivate them. Winterson’s title, “Sexing the Cherry,” is about that process.
And about so much more. A series of surrealistic episodes involving Jordan form a contrast to the Dog Woman’s messy, violent, frequently hilarious (I believe “Rabelaisian” is the term), mostly scandalous life in the slums. Jordan’s episodes involve questions of gender roles, questions about what it means to be human, questions about humanity’s place in the universe, and in these episodes, Jordan’s storyline shifts from 17th century England to the present and back again with dizzying speed. Who is he, really? Who is any one of us, and do constraints of space and time really bind us?
This is where the Twelve Dancing Princesses come into the book, in case you were wondering. Jordan meets one of them, becomes entranced by her, and then loses her as she seemingly escapes the narrow role she has been forced to play. His search for her leads him to her eleven sisters (the princesses), and as he encounters each sister, he learns her tale of how she escaped the cruel or sometimes just boorish prince who has claimed her. Why this particular fairytale? It seems to speak to Winterson, maybe as a stand-in for the lives women in Jordan’s era have been forced to lead. His transitions back and forth to the present suggest perhaps that these strict and damaging expectations are still operating in the world. There’s nothing stridently feminist in the book in terms of bald statements and sermonizing–I suppose I’d say it’s simply, profoundly inherently feminist.
What I loved most about this book: The gorgeous writing. I love fantasy–reading it, and writing it. I love any kind of well-written speculative fiction, and I don’t care whether it’s “literary” or “genre” or what it is–if it works, and ON ITS OWN TERMS, I’m going to love it. But, primarily, I’m a poet. And Winterson’s book is poetry. I was blown away by it. The writing isn’t divided into lines, nothing rhymes, but it’s poetry in the best sense of the word. And that’s how I read it. Here’s an example. Writing about a moment of extreme jeopardy: “The moment has been waiting the way the top step of the stairs waits for the sleepwalker.” Read that one and think yourself deep into it. Wow.
You can read my poetry blog, by the way, at https://utopiary.wordpress.com. I’m nowhere near the poet Winterson is, though. I’m guessing almost no one is.
A side-note: Genre fiction lovers, don’t feel left out by this post! I’d just like to point out that John Tradescant is the main character in a two-book series by Phillipa Gregory (Earthly Joys and Virgin Earth). I really, really liked these books, even though a lot of times I don’t like her books much. You might want to try them–I think they aren’t as well known as The Other Boleyn Girl and some of her other very popular historical novels.
My experience buying this book:
I read this book through the Kindle app on my iPad. Getting the book was very easy. I went to the Amazon web site and bought the book through One-Click, and presto, it appeared on my iPad. The experience would have been even easier and faster if my Kindle device had been available to me.
Fantastes 
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