Review:
The darker side of fairy tales-Grimm, A review

Recently I mentioned the pilot episode of ABC’s Once Upon a Time (Ok it was only two days ago, but that the risk when retrospectively blogging!) a show whose entire premise hangs on the existence of those fables we know and love... Well it seems that they were not alone in having that idea this winter.

The Brothers Grimm (for those of you who have don’t have a passing knowledge of Germanic literature of the 1800’s or simply can’t be bothered to go on Wikipedia) were a couple of academics, linguists and authors made famous mostly by the anthology of stories they put together in their imaginatively titled “Children’s and Household Tales” luckily marketing ruled out and eventually this was later to become simply known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales. This collection brought together around two hundred folk stories and legends are held within its pages the likes of Rapunzel, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty... it also has the tale of The Mouse, the Bird and the Sausage apparently but I feel that’s probably one saved for another time!

What you probably were NOT aware of (unless you’ve been watching NBC online as well) is that their tales are all based on true life events and that the brothers went on to found a group of elite monster hunters who throughout the generations have fought to keep humanity safe from things that go bump in the night…wait…what?!?

Let us meet Nick, a homicide detective from Portland, Oregon who we find trying to discover the truth behind the savage attack on a young co-ed jogger in the local woodland, her tattered red hoodie abandoned at the crime scene.

If dealing with the horrors of working the murder squad in the modern world isn’t hard enough as it is, onto the scene arrives his mysterious and frankly a more than a little bit “eccentric” Aunt Marie who has some portentous new for young Nick.

You see, our young detective is a “Grimm”, one of those with the ability to see the true form of those creatures hiding in our midst and charged with keeping the balance between the normal world and an entire menagerie of mythological monsters that we’re probably all off better being ignorant about.