Robert Coover’s Briar Rose (1997) is a short but dense little fiction that plumbs the depths of the Sleeping Beauty legend, foregrounding the age-old patterns at the heart of its many variations. Coover, a master of metafiction and grandee of postmodern American literature, accomplishes something really cool in this book, and that’s why people like it despite how torturous it can be to read. Basically, he reaches into the core of an ancient allegory and turns it inside out, until we’re left not with a story but with an atemporal character study of three archetypes: the Sleeping Beauty, her prince, and the wicked fairy who entraps them, one in briars and the other in sleep.

The fairy is a study in paradox: she separates her victims and binds them together, oppresses them and makes them figures worthy of myth. She also provides them with the joint purpose central not only to their story but to the very essence of their characters (passive wait + heroic tribulations = the kiss), a purpose whose fulfillment is the culmination of their existence in our minds (happily ever after…the end).

Unlike the characters in modern, personality-driven novels, the characters in Sleeping Beauty are their story; they have no personalities beyond their time-honored roles, beyond their significance within the cultural lexicons that reproduce them. Their tale isn’t driven by any specific psychological, emotional, or social dynamic; it’s driven by its plot, to which they as individuals are entirely incidental, but to which they as allegorical figures are everything.

Of course, that’s pretty much how all old fairytales work. But in Coover’s metafictional retelling of this one, Beauty, her prince, and the fairy are all three of them aware of their own abstraction, reflecting throughout the novella on their existence not as human individuals but as archetypes, referents, ideas, inseparable from each other and the allegory they embody.

Briar Rose is by no means a bathtub read (what was your first clue?), and at times it can even be a painful one, because for all its Disneyfication, Sleeping Beauty was once, like most fairytales, more horror than fun. Magic wasn’t always the stuff of daydreams, and Coover understands this all too well. But if, like me, you care about old stories, and you’re interested in understanding them more deeply, then this book will absolutely be worth the effort it takes to read it. I recommend you do so all in one sitting; it’s a very short piece of literature, and a single, committed binge is the best way to experience its full emotional impact.