American author Marissa Meyer has spent much of the past decade re-imagining classic fairy stories and turning them into smash hits.
In her new book Gilded, Meyer spins a new take on the tale of Rumpelstiltskin - giving the "miller's daughter" a name and quite a backstory.
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Meyer's debut novel, Cinder (2012) was a young adult science fiction tale loosely based on Cinderella that became a New York Times bestseller.
She followed it up with three more instalments in her Lunar Chronicles series. Then came an Alice in Wonderland prequel - Heartless; her own superhero series, Renegades; and last year she released Instant Karma, which is being adapted for TV by HBO.
She has always had a deep love of fairy tales, she tells Kathryn Ryan.
“I grew up with Disney as so many of us do. But around five or six years old, I was given my first book of fairy tale stories, the original versions, and I remember reading them and being slightly discouraged, maybe to learn that they were so different from the movies that I was watching.
“But that just opened up this huge burning curiosity to know more about these stories. And what else is Disney not telling me that they can be so dark and so gory, and so weird.”
She started to read these tales in their original form, and Rumpelstiltskin made an early impression.
“It was one of my favourite stories growing up. But it was also one of the stories that I think frustrated me the most. I felt like there were some really big plot holes in this tale.
“I wanted to know why Rumpelstiltskin wanted the baby. What did he plan on doing with this child that he was bargaining for?
“I wanted to know whether or not the miller’s daughter, who becomes the Queen, does she actually get a happy ending? Is this an actual love match between her and the King who has threatened to kill her multiple times for this completely arbitrary thing?
“And I mostly I really wanted to know what happened when the King found out that she could not in fact spin straw into gold, which I felt has to come up at some point after their marriage and yet in the fairy tale it is just this blank spot we never find out.”
In Gilded, Meyer attempts to fill in those plot holes by doing a complete 180.
“I decided that in my version, the king would be the villain and Rumpelstiltskin is actually the love interest.
“And so that gave me a lot of freedom to take this character and play with some of those motivations and really figure out what is going on here.”
In Gilded, Serilda, the daughter of the miller in this very small town, has been cursed by the god of lies, Meyer says.
“She can't help herself sometimes, but it has also turned her into a marvellous storyteller. And this gift-slash-curse of hers gets her into trouble when one night under the full moon. She crosses paths with the wicked Earl King who is the leader of the Wild Hunt, and she tells him that she is capable of spinning straw into gold.”
In Meyer’s version, Serilda finds herself whisked away to the Earl King’s haunted castle where - surrounded by ghosts and monsters - she's locked in a room in order to spin straw into gold and if she fails, she will be put to death.
“She of course can't do it, but soon she meets a handsome and kind of mischievous poltergeist who is trapped in the castle and he agrees to help her.
“But of course, all magic comes at a price.”
Meyer took a “deep dive” into German and Norse mythology to inform Gilded, she says.
“The folktales, the monsters, even some of the old pagan gods, and I used that to try to create this kind of dark underbelly world.”
