
The 1994 short story Snow, Glass, Apples has Neil Gaiman painting a very different story of Snow White than the one we heard in the childhood fable.
Plot[]
The Queen is still a witch to be sure, but the traditional heroine of the story is not as she seems. As the Queen tells it, people have always been afraid of the Princess and she discovers why a few months after she marries the King. The little Princess comes to the Queen in the dead of winter because she is hungry, but, when given a dried apple to eat, instead bites the Queen's hand, drinking deeply of her blood. The wound left by the child's teeth heals unnaturally quickly, becoming a scar in a few short hours.
Over time, the King also begins to succumb to the Princess' bites, wastes away and eventually dies. The Queen remembers that he had only one scar during his youth but just before his death was covered with scars, including ones on his thighs, testes and penis. After the King's death, the Queen has the Princess taken into the woods and her heart cut out. The Queen hangs the still-beating heart in her room with rowan berries and garlic bulbs to protect her from the Princess' evil.
Many years later, the folk of the forest begin to go missing and the ones that can actually make it to the Spring fair have the same symptoms of being fed upon that the King did. The Queen uses her magic mirror to see what is causing the forest folk to go missing. She watches her stepdaughter feast upon a monk in the woods, black filthy blood oozing from between her thighs. The Queen decides to take care of the problem by poisoning some apples and leaving them for the Princess to find. After eating the apples, the heart in the Queen's room stops beating.
While the Princess lays under her glass coffin, the Queen attempts to court a traveling Prince from across the mountains. He is a necrophiliac, however. The Prince asks the Queen to pretend to be a corpse will he makes love to her but ends up leaving sexually frustrated. When he finds the Princess in the woods he is excited because she is a fresh corpse for him to mount. The Prince and the Princess eventually make their way back to the Queen who has been awoken by her stepdaughter's heart beginning to beat again, spilling blood on her face. The Queen is arrested, shaved, smeared in goose fat and thrown in a kiln to cook.