Cinderella: The Ash Bride

In Cinderella: The Ash Bride, J.F. Pryce reimagines the classic fairy tale into a dark, gothic story of rot, dark magic, and bloody retribution. Trapped in a decaying manor under the cruelty of her stepmother and sisters, Cinderella—reduced to sleeping in embers and named after soot—turns to the only thing listening to her grief: the dark earth at her mother’s grave. When the prince announces three nights of revels, Cinderella bargains with her mother’s vengeful ghost to escape her abuse. In exchange for a gown woven from moth wings and razor-sharp glass slippers that thirst for blood, Cinderella enters a grotesque royal court where beauty comes at a harrowing price and every gift demands a deadly toll. Faced with the prince’s suffocating control and her mother's impending debt, Cinderella must navigate a world of carnivalesque rot to claim her power, discovering how far she is willing to go to turn her oppressors to ash.