Taking established properties and adding new stories or fresh twists has become quite the lucrative market not just in books but films too.
Authors like Christina Henry have successfully added new stories to lore such as Sleepy Hollow, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan.
Co-authors David Demchuk and Corinne Leigh Clark have gone straight for the gothic with a story of Mrs. Lovett, the butcher of Whitechapel from the Sweeney Todd universe.
The twist here is that for half the story we follow the daughter of Mrs. Lovett as she tries to first find her mother but also find out if the legends about her are true.
What quickly develops is a correspondence-style narrative between Emily Gibson (said daughter) and the person she believes is her biological mother.
Admittedly, this part is slow going, but once Demchuk and Clark shift gear and we get into the real Sweeney Todd territory, featuring an extremely vicious version of the demon barber, which knocks Johnny Depp’s film performance out of the water.
At its heart, The Butcher’s Daughter is a story about a woman’s fight for survival in Victorian England, and having to make dark choices in order to survive and, to a point, thrive. Remember, this is a time when a woman’s place was firmly in the kitchen or bringing up children, so Mrs. Lovett, in this respect, is quite progressive.
For those looking for something gothic and moderately familiar, you can’t go far wrong with The Butcher’s Daughter.
The Butcher’s Daughter by Corinne Leigh Clark and David Demchuk is available in various formats from Titan Books.
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