Just like Andersen, the Grimm brothers or Isak Dinesen, A. S. Byatt understands that fairytales are not written for children. She makes this clear in her Little Black Book of Stories, a collection of five short stories in which she challenges all the norms of the fairytale by providing a black vision of childhood tales. The realism of her characters and her terrifying tales of monsters and all kinds of sordid creatures pull us into a strange universe, situated half-way between the real and the fantastic.