Once Upon the End: Volume One - Hardcover

Fairy tales teach us that monsters can be defeated, curses can be broken, and love can conquer anything.

These stories disagree.

In Once Upon the End: Volume One, Matt Walker reimagines beloved fairy tales through the lens of horror, dark fantasy, gothic romance, and tragedy. Familiar legends are stripped to their bones and rebuilt into stories where desire becomes obsession, beauty becomes corruption, and every happy ending carries a price.

A boy who never grew up discovers what eternity truly costs. A child learns the horrifying truth hidden inside the promise of becoming more. A sleeping princess finds herself trapped within a dream that refuses to end. A mermaid waits beneath black water for a love that can never survive the surface. A girl in red walks willingly toward the monster she should fear.

Across nine dark fairy tales, heroes become villains, villains become victims, and the line between salvation and damnation grows increasingly thin.

At their heart, these stories explore the same question:

What piece of yourself are you willing to sacrifice to become the person you think you want to be?

Featuring the first five entries in the Once Upon the End series, along with the exclusive stories Tresses of Love, Blue Was Her Favorite Color, Cloaked in Red and Shadowless, this collector's edition gathers more than five hundred pages of haunting fiction into a single volume.

Beautiful. Tragic. Unsettling.

These are not stories about happily ever after.

They are the stories about what remains when the magic is gone.