No matter what you write, you actually can't help retelling a fairy tale somewhere along the way.

It's just that in detective stories, women are usually dead before the curtain goes up. In fairy tales, they're usually alive. Fairy tales are about survival. That's all they're about. The princess lives to get married in the last act. The detective solves the woman; the knight saves her.
And really, really, when you put a fairy tale together with grime and despair and industrial angst you get the Gothic, and that's where we live, Percy.

Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons; it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.

And the marvellous rose became crimson, like the rose of the eastern sky. Crimson was the girdle of petals, and crimson as a ruby was the heart

Once upon a time, Sleeping Beauty decided to take a nap from which she would never wake up.

East of the sun and west of the moon.