If the briny menace and moral sharpness of “The Daughter Cells” or the chilling sibling loyalty in “The Six Boy-Coffins” thrilled you, Carter’s retellings will feel like a homecoming with sharper knives. In “The Bloody Chamber,” her Bluebeard bride narrates a seduction turned entrapment, and a mother’s thundering rescue reclaims the tale’s power. Elsewhere, stories like “The Company of Wolves” and “Puss-in-Boots” twist familiar myths into sensual, sinister shapes—just the kind of teeth-baring folklore you loved in The Merry Spinster.

You laughed and winced at the same time when the social cruelty in “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Mr. Toad” curdled into menace. Machado does that balancing act constantly. “The Husband Stitch” weds urban-legend terror to a wry voice; “Inventory” catalogs lovers through an apocalypse with bleak humor; and “Especially Heinous” turns a TV recap into a haunted, hysterically unsettling chorus. It’s the same sly, morbid chuckle you heard between the lines of The Merry Spinster, now turned up and refracted through bodies, desire, and dread.

If the case-file cool of “Fear Not: An Incident Log” scratched your Narnia-adjacent itch with bureaucratic snark, you’ll love this procedural where Agent Henrietta “Henry” Marchen and her team police fairy-tale outbreaks before they overwrite reality. Reports, debriefs, and incident codes dissect curses and glass-slipper destinies with biting humor—like watching Lavery’s log-entry satire go full throttle across a city full of weaponized narratives.

If hopping from the salt-slick horror of “The Daughter Cells” to the ruthless courtship of “The Frog’s Princess” delighted you, Link’s collection offers that same anthology pleasure: each tale a new trapdoor. “I Can See Right Through You” turns a ghost story into a celebrity-autopsy of love; “The Summer People” gives you folkloric debt and obligation; “The New Boyfriend” makes haunted dolls a teen status symbol. Every story lands with that Merry Spinster vibe—compact, uncanny, and quietly feral.

If you relished how The Merry Spinster’s narrators make barbed choices—think the ruthless courtship calculus in “The Frog’s Princess” or the chilling domestic power of “The Rabbit”—Novik’s Miryem, Irina, and Wanda will grip you. Miryem turns silver to gold and leverages debt into survival, bargaining with a winter-king whose gifts cut both ways. The queens and girls here are no saints; they scheme, compromise, and claim power in a landscape of cold folklore and colder courts.