A note on "The Fear Eater"

I don't know how I feel about this one. Originally it was a class assignment. I never know how to feel about those. We were studying Brothers Grimm and Edgar Allan Poe around the same time. My professor assigned it on a whim because class discussion was fun that day.... Not really much else to it. I had a week to write it. I read a lot of Brothers Grimm before attempting it. It seemed to me that the majority of their fables were about death – evading it, bargaining with it, always getting caught by it. Or they were just about some ultimate defeat in some way; but how else can a tale become a cautionary tale if it doesn't have characters who learn from extremes they're given? The character's age and mental stage also need to reach out to as many audiences as they can, otherwise the cautionary message, morally essential for all of society to hear, will only be heard by a select few. That, it seemed apparent, was the key to making a fable work: reach everybody, touch their conscience or pluck moral strings.

My thoughts were always... but is it too morbid? Brothers Grimm were pretty morbid – and for kids. I just went with it. What's important isn't the “death”. What is, is the “fear.” It's about overcoming simple fear, and (I had hoped) the setting is so simple that it's some place everyone can relate to.