Folk fairy tales are populated with violent sadists, monstrous figures who take their hatred out on those closest to them: there is the witch in “Hansel and Gretel” who fattens the young boy up to make him more appetizing; the stepmother in “The Juniper Tree” who kills her stepson and feeds him to his own father in a delicious stew; “Bluebeard,” whose wives disappear under mysterious circumstances. And then there is the paragraph-long Grimms story of a disobedient child whose hand raises from the ground as he is buried, raising with it the question of whether he is buried alive. The mother gets into the grave, lowers his hand, and then, we are told, he can finally rest peacefully.

These are stories told and retold; wish fulfillments packaged as children’s stories; articulations of our darkest fears and desires. For Sigmund Freud, folk fairy tales, which he sees as enmeshed in children’s psyches, usurp the place of real memories, cloaking an event we would rather not remember in a beguiling fiction that has some similarities to everyday life. For the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, the fairy tale is embedded in the contradictions of utopian longing. Folk tales morph and shift over time, but the desire for a better life and for justice keeps alive the wish fulfillments at the heart of these tales.

The Mexican author Fernanda Melchor uses the wrathful genre of the fairy tale to elucidate the relationship between structural crises, violence, and storytelling. In Melchor’s Mexico, people routinely attribute acts of brutality to evil spirits and bad vibes; journalist and police reports cite the presence of “witches” against whom men act in violent self-defense. Melchor sees the fairy tale — like the genres of sensationalist crime reportage and narco-literature, a subgenre that emerged in the mid-2000s — as reproducing real-world violence.