Previously published in Dawn Books & Authors.

A YOUNG soldier “born in war, raised in war” is caught in the madness, fear and horror of the mid-17th century Thirty Years’ War. Having somehow cheated Death, Otto meets a “half-beast, half-man” creature, a sort of shaman who heals his wounds and explains to him how a pair of magic dice work. The shaman leaves the dice with Otto, who is afraid and confused and chooses to let them dictate where he travels, setting on the path to a strange, hallucinatory and frightening journey.

Hiding in a tree to get away from the beasts that are howling down the forest, Otto meets a runaway, a svelte young man who turns out to be the beautiful princess Safire attempting to escape her evil stepmother. Of course, they fall in love, are separated, and Otto will do anything to be together with her again — this is inevitable. This is a fairy story, a teen wish fulfilment fantasy.

Carnegie Medal and Costa Book Award winner Sally Gardner’s Tinder is a gothic, dramatic re-telling of the Hans Christian Anderson fable ‘The Tinderbox’. The original story too features a soldier who bests a witch to gain control over a magic tinderbox. By striking a match against it, the soldier is able to control three dogs and have them do his bidding. In Tinder, Otto finds himself in a dark, looming castle where magnificent feasts appear out of nowhere and the furniture moves around to accommodate him. The castle and all its trickery belong to the Lady of the Nail, a masked woman with a thumb nail “grown so long that it spiralled over and over itself,” and whose scent of myrrh and frankincense is so strong that it fogs Otto’s reason. The Lady of the Nail insists that Otto stay three nights in comfort at her home but that she must be repaid by a favour at the end of the three nights.

Though she alludes that this favour may be sexual (there’s a general threat of rape throughout the narrative), she eventually sends Otto down into three cavernous chambers, each filled with bronze, silver and gold coins respectively, and each protected by a wolf of increasing size and menace, a wolf that turns into a man and offers to obey Otto once released from his wolf-shape. The tinderbox is in the last chamber and once Otto is in possession of it he manages to keep it by having the wolves tear apart the Lady of the Nail in a strange, almost accidental sort of attack. Otto then continues along the road the dice lead him to, attempting in his own confused way to find Safire.

Otto is buffeted around constantly — by war, by his fellow soldiers, by the magic dice, by fate. It’s fairly annoying and not at all endearing to witness a protagonist who is mostly unable to get a grip on what’s going on around him.

When Otto reaches the town Safire is in, he finds that it is under threat by werewolves and that as a stranger, he is the one most fingers point to when something terrible happens. He has no real plan other than to use his new found wolf-gold, no real direction other than the general “go north” or “go south” messages the dice gives him (which he does ignore at times) and no real way of getting Safire to be with him other than commanding the wolves to bring her to him.

He does, on occasion, manage to stumble into the right place at the right time, but it seems mainly to tell the reader about something else. For instance, the one time Otto manages to get into the palace gardens to look for Safire, he and the reader are witness to a nasty exchange between Safire and the prince she is betrothed to. Though Safire is steadfast in her refusal to marry the prince, he is clear about his aggressive intentions. “Whether you like it, or not, my lady, when we are married I will assail you so fiercely that you will dare not resist,” he tells her, much to Otto’s horror.

The threat of rape comes up repeatedly, not just in the prince’s words to Safire or the Lady of the Nail’s to Otto, but also in Otto’s past. It is made clear that the 18-year-old Otto is traumatised having witnessed several rapes — not just that of his sister by enemy soldiers, but also that of other young women by his own comrades, who would invite him to join them. Sex is a traumatic act for Otto, who reacts badly to a brothel visit with his commander as well, though there is no threat of rape at that point.

It’s a strange underlying terror that is constant in Tinder, making the reading of the story very uncomfortable, which is probably what every fable should do. The frequent dream sequences, placed on smudgy black illustrated patches on the white paper of the book work towards making the reader a little discombobulated, which is just what Otto is most of the time, even though as possessor of the tinderbox, he is the one character to potentially have most agency. Of course, this is the very curse of the tinderbox — the person who has it cannot ever be truly rid of it, or be able to control the methods the wolves use to grant the possessor’s wishes.

The nightmarish illustrations by David Roberts, placed through the book, add to the element of gothic menace. Black and white, with fiercely placed bright bloody red, they are what really makes Tinder stand out. While the prose itself can be a little florid at times and just ever so slightly melodramatic (though admittedly this is the nature of the beast), the drawings are just perfectly horrific, from those of the bloody battlefield to the dismembered bodies in the nightmares Otto has, to those of the fanged, ferocious wolves at his commend.

Is Tinder for young adults? Possibly, but as with all good YA novels, this too has some very dark corners filled with sharp teeth and howls. And while in theory it should be all-out fantastic— it’s dark, it’s lush and it’s complicated, it’s even a gorgeous physical book — it falls just that tiny, tiny bit short of being that brilliant fairy tale, that story that keeps you up and terrified.