Some Kind of Fairy Tale

Some Kind of Fairy Tale is a 2012 speculative fiction novel by British author Graham Joyce. Set in modern-day Leicestershire, England, it concerns the disappearance and reappearance of Tara who, upon returning to her parents, claims that she was trapped in a parallel world. The novel borrows heavily from Irish folklore, particularly the trope of fairy abduction, the distortion of time, and the pitfalls of hedonistic behavior, such as excessive eating, drinking, and partying. It resonates with the work of many early- and mid-modern Irish authors, including Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Lord Dunsany, and William Butler Yeats. The novel won the Fantasy Novel of the Year award given by the British Fantasy Society and has been adapted into a screenplay of the same name.

Some Kind of Fairy Tale begins in Leicestershire, around the time that Tara disappears. The last Tara remembered, she was wandering in Charnwood Forest and encountered a strange man named Hiero. Tara goes missing for the next twenty years. After grieving for years, her parents accept that there is no chance of her returning. However, one Christmas Day, Tara reappears. She looks just like the fifteen-year-old girl she was when she vanished, though the rest of the human world has moved on without her. Believing that she has only been gone for six months, she is shocked when her parents explain that she has been missing for two decades. They are now old and infirm; her brother, Peter, is no longer a kid, but a married man. Richie, her former boyfriend, has suffered in her absence. The past twenty years of his life have been plagued with depression and grief, compelling him to turn to drugs and alcohol.

When Tara tells her family that she had not run away or been abducted, but has been trapped in the fairy universe, they consider the story preposterous. Tara stands up for herself despite their doubt. She tries to search for Hiero, the stranger who met her in the forest and pulled her into the fairy world. She believes that Hiero has followed her back into the human world to hurt Richie, since Richie’s love for her forged the interdimensional bridge that she crossed to get back. Tara’s family hires a psychiatrist, Dr. Underwood, to diagnose her “symptoms.” The psychiatrist interprets her story as a defense mechanism, suggesting that she created it to repress some unknown traumatic experiences she endured while she was gone.



Tara struggles to reacclimate to the human world and her ordinary friends and family. She has become dissatisfied with the world in comparison to the land of the fairies. One day, she encounters her eccentric neighbor, Mrs. Larwood. Claiming that she, too, was one abducted by fairies, she cautions Tara that it is dangerous to shift back and forth between parallel worlds, for one can permanently lose one’s sense of reality.

When Richie is attacked twice without any explanation, Tara is convinced that his assailant is Hiero. After the attacks, Richie is diagnosed with brain cancer. The shocking diagnosis reaffirms Tara’s belief that Hiero is acting on his threat to destroy Richie’s mind. At the end of the novel, Tara disappears again. She leaves a note for her family and boyfriend explaining that she must leave in order to protect Richie from Hiero’s wrath. Some Kind of Fairy Tale leaves Tara’s full set of motives ambiguous, suggesting that the human world might not suffice once one is exposed to the spectacular world of Irish fantasy.