Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmest

Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmest starts from a blunt premise: the fairy tales most people grew up with are the softened bedtime versions, and the originals are weirder, sometimes gross and often scary. Adam Gidwitz, who introduces himself as an author and storyteller, tells those originals out loud to groups of kids. The kids are not a backdrop. They predict betrayals, take wild guesses at the identity of a stranger in a long green coat before Gidwitz reveals that in these tales that figure is always the devil, and volunteer verdicts such as no longer liking the title character of 'Darling Roland'. Gidwitz keeps them working with questions about what they would do and how they would feel, and he pauses to define words like platoon and sulk without losing the thread. The tales are strange in the way old tales are strange. In 'Adam's Sneak Peeks | The Poor Soldier Boy', a deserter hiding in a swamp trades seven years of service for safety, then finds his old sergeant boiling in a cauldron. Death turns up as a bony old man who swings open a cliff face onto a cold gray orchard in 'The Figs (Adam's Secrets Version)'. In 'The Two Travelers (Part ll)', a tailor sees cheerfully through one eye, gloomily through the other, and through both sees how people will die. 'The Secret Language' sets an old woman who turns visitors to stone against a private language the kids try to decode on the spot. Comedy keeps the dread in check. A blue dwarf grumbles about princes ignoring speed limits that do not exist yet, and a trip to the outhouse in 'Darling Roland' becomes a small farce. The rating system is the most practical feature: Gidwitz labels a tale Grimm, Grimmer or Grimmest up front and explains the call, from a Grimmer story with no gore but a very creepy destination to a Grimmest one with an enormous amount of death. Anyone who gets frightened is told to turn the volume down, count to five and come back when ready. Production is full-scale, with voice actors, sound design and, in 'Darling Roland', an original sung duet. Some tales are split in two, as with 'The Twelve Tortoises (Part I)' and 'The Twelve Tortoises (Part II)'. Re-releases tagged 'Adam's Secrets Version' add reflection, including his argument that most bad guys are driven by fear rather than evil for its own sake, and his explanation of why he turned a fig-loving king into a rich man from another country who misses the taste of figs. 'Adam's Sneak Peeks' strips things back to drafts recorded at home, without kids or sound effects, and invites emails and voicemails to help shape them. Discussion episodes such as 'Adam and Liz Gotauco Discuss Fairy Tales' and 'Adam Talks Scary Stories with Unspookable' turn to fairy tales and scary stories as subjects in their own right. A listener easing in can start at the low end of the scale with the Grimm-rated 'The Three Feathers (Part I)'.