The Faery Taile Project Books in Order

The Faery Taile Project is a smaller corner of Jim C. Hines's bibliography, but it fits neatly with a lot of his larger interests. The basic idea is that a familiar fairy tale should not belong to only one version, one angle, or one easy moral. Instead of treating the old story as fixed, this project pulls it apart and lets more than one voice have a say.

In practice, that means paired retellings. The book here, Red's Tale / Lobo's Tale, takes the Little Red Riding Hood material and reframes it through two linked perspectives, one from Red's side and one from the wolf's. Hines wrote Red's Tale, and Christopher Kastensmidt wrote Lobo's Tale, so the volume is collaborative by design. That matters, because the whole point is not just to retell a fairy tale but to show how different storytellers can change what the tale feels like.

It is a clever structure for a short project.

A lot of Red Riding Hood retellings simply make Red tougher or the wolf more misunderstood. The Faery Taile Project goes a little further by building the book around the tension between those two impulses. Once you know there is another version waiting on the other side, every early assumption starts to wobble. Who is hunting whom? What looks like menace from one angle may look like survival or pride from another. The bedtime clarity of hero, victim, and monster gives way to something more playful and complicated.

That makes this page a good fit for readers who like Hines's Princess books and his goblin work, but want something shorter and more experimental. The tone is still accessible, and there is still humor in the way the old material gets remixed, yet the scale is tighter. These are not sprawling novels with a long cast and layered political plots. They are linked tales, built to bounce off each other and make you rethink the shape of a story you thought you already knew.

It is less about preserving the childhood version than about asking why that version won.

Because there is only one volume here, the series background is really about the concept as much as the plot. Expect fractured fairy tale energy, a back-and-forth between viewpoints, and a willingness to question simple labels. Expect a story that remembers wolves are interesting not just because they are scary, but because people keep needing them to stand for something.

If you enjoy fairy-tale retellings that play with perspective instead of just changing costumes, The Faery Taile Project is an appealing side trip. It is compact, a little sly, and very much in line with Hines's habit of looking at old genres from the edges instead of the throne room.