Welcome, one and all. My name is Filipe Faria, Portuguese novelist and all-around purveyor of stories and fantasy tales, and this is my little foray into the English-speaking market. Please bear with me as I go against Lewis Carroll’s sound advice and don’t “begin at the beginning” (please check the About Me section for that part), but rather go straight to the point: The sales pitch of The Perraultimatum, book one of my ongoing fantasy series Happily Upon a Time. Originally published in Portugal in 2012 as O Perraultimato and now available in English after I decided to try my luck in the wild, untamed and 100% democratic world of online independent publishing, The Perraultimatum is a book that is near and dear to my heart. Perhaps eve more so than all the others, to a certain extent, as I’ll be explaining below.
Happily Upon a Time is a tale that, as it goes, grew in the telling – only I wasn’t the one telling it, but rather my mother. Like most parents, mine didn’t have a particularly easy time putting me to bed and getting me to sleep, and the most effective way of doing so turned out to be getting my imagination rolling so I’d look forward to dreaming. Demanding little rascal that I was, though, I wouldn’t accept your run-of-the-mill stories, so my mother came up with veritable medleys of fairy tales – both of the literary and Disney animation kind – which she made up on the fly. Those stories were muddled, facile and straightforward, and I absolutely loved them, creating my own continuity and narrative background to explain just why different characters from completely different settings would be interacting with each other in this strange, undefined crossover world.
That idea never really left my mind and, years later, after I finished my first fantasy series, The Chronicles of Allaryia (more on that in future posts), I realized that, after years of note-taking and tale-gathering, I already had enough material to embark on a brand new and completely different adventure. Not only that, it seemed to have already taken on a life of its own, to boot. However, as childlike fascination had been tempered by a measure of adult cynicism in the meantime, this was no longer just about telling an adventure in which characters of different fairy tales met up, but rather the tale of a world in which all stories not only existed contiguously, they had also ended in horrific fashion for some dark, mysterious reason for all those involved.
While perfectly aware that the concept of twisted fairy tales isn’t anything new and that I wasn’t reinventing the wheel, there is a method to the madness that seems to have overtaken the world of Happily Upon a Time, and some characters are indeed aware in an almost meta-narrative sense that their stories weren’t meant to have ended the way they did. And so, in The Perraultimatum, these select few characters embark on a quest to find out whether or not they had lived happily upon a time… and if they may yet get to live happily ever after.
Please join me in the next entry, where I’ll be listing the characters, their roles, how they came about and how much they differ from their roots.