No need for Princes: Whistling for the wolf

"You don't need princes to save you," says Neil Gaiman, speaking about his new fairy tale, The Sleeper and the Spindle. "I don't have patience for stories in which women are rescued by men."

In his slim, wicked book, a beautiful queen calls off her own wedding and sets out to save a neighbouring kingdom from its plague of sleep.

The brilliance of Gaiman's story - illustrated by Chris Riddell - lies in elements he's chosen for his mash-up. While classical fairy-tale characters are stock figures (the princess, the hunter, the stepmother, the beast), Gaiman's protagonists are the products of their pasts.

Snow White's story so far has given her knight-like valour: thanks to her stepmother, she knows evil in another woman's eyes; having spent a year in a glass coffin, she braves the land of sleep; because of the poisoned apple, she recognises the smell of magic; and when it comes to travelling companions, she has an affinity with dwarves.

But even this Snow White doesn't know who's who when it comes to the climactic scene in the castle. The Sleeper and the Spindle is a story of three women, none of whom is quite what you imagine.

Are fairy tales back in fashion?

Certainly the recent success of Disney's films Frozen and Maleficentpoints to something.

Angela Carter turned the form inside out with The Bloody Chamber (1979). Marina Warner - whose new short book about fairy tales, Once Upon a Time , is just out - wrote her seminal work, From the Beast to the Blonde, in 1994. In other words, it's never really stopped: fairy tales shape our world view and stalk our literature.

Gaiman, whose Coraline has become a generation's favourite, knows about stories that live on a dark threshold.

"The Bloody Chamber is such an important book to me," he says. "Angela Carter said: 'You see these fairy stories sitting at the back of the nursery shelves? Each of them is a loaded gun, a bomb. If you turn it right, it blows up.' I went: 'Oh my gosh, she's right - you can blow things up with these.'"

When I ask Gaiman who his favourite fairy-tale character is, he says Carter's Red Riding Hood inThe Company of Wolves, an ornately told story in which the heroine appears in a savage, sexual world. She's a daring pubescent girl who strips naked, laughs in the face of danger and sleeps with the wolf - rendering him post-coitally "tender" - in her dead grandmother's bed.

Does Gaiman have an agenda rewriting fairy tales? ''Yeah, I do," he says . ''I want people to imagine. I think that your imagination is the most important tool you possess. It's a muscle, and unless it's exercised it atrophies." He points to the lines he used as an epigraph to Coraline: ''Fairy tales are more than true - not because they tell us dragons exist but because they tell us dragons can be beaten." - ©The Daily Telegraph

• 'The Sleeper and the Spindle' by Gaiman and Riddell (Bloomsbury) is available at Exclusive Books for R302