(From the awful fairy tale anthology A Wild Swan and Other Tales, the preface to his version of Beauty and the Beast)

You’ve met the beast. He’s ahead of you at the convenience store, buying smokes and a Slim Jim, flirting with the unamused Jamaican cashier. He’s slouching across the aisle on the Brooklyn-bound G train, sinewy forearms crawling with tattoos. He’s holding court - crass and coke-fueled, insultingly funny - at that after-hours party your girlfriend has insisted on, to which you’ve gone because you’re not ready, not yet, to be the kind of girl who wouldn’t. You may find yourself offering yourself to him. Because you're sick of the boys who want to get to know you before they’ll sleep with you ("sleep with you" is the phrase they use); the boys who ask, apologetically, if they came too soon; who call the next day to tell you they had a really great time. Or because you’re starting to worry that a certain train is about to leave the station; that although you’ll willingly board a different train, one for marriage and motherhood, that train may take its passengers to a verdant and orderly realm from which few ever return; that the few who try to return discover that what’s felt like mere hours to them has been twenty years back home; that they feel grotesque and desperate at parties that they could swear had wanted them, had pawed and nuzzled the, just last night or the night before. Or because you believe, you actually believe, you can undo the damage others have done to the jittery gauntly handsome guy with the cigarettes and the Slim Jim, to the dour young subway boy, to the glib and cynical fast-talker who looks at others as if to say, Are you an asshole or a fool?, those being his only two categories.

(In his version of Beauty and the Beast, Beauty is an uncaring, haughty, passive-aggressive bitch who fantasises about being raped by her father and by the Beast, is disappointed that the Beast does not rape her, and agrees to marry the Beast mostly to spite the people of her home village. The twist ending is that the prince was evil all along, ending on "She backs away. Grinning victoriously, emitting a low growl of triumph, he advances.")