Grimms Märchen (Grimms' fairy tales) influenced The book of lost things

Connolly's novel is built out of Grimm tales retold as they would be if they meant it. A boy whose mother has died walks into a wood and finds himself inside the stories she read to him, and the stories do not behave. Named and reworked inside it: Little Red Riding Hood, whose encounter with the wolf has consequences the tale does not record and produces the Loups; Snow White, whose dwarfs are unionised and resentful; Hansel and Gretel; and Rumpelstiltskin, who becomes the Crooked Man and the book's antagonist. Connolly appended his own versions of the source tales to the novel, which is about as explicit as a writer gets about where a book came from.