Post 3 of 5: Brothers Grimm Story Writing Competition: Little Red Riding Hood Does Over the Big Bad Wolf by Wendy O'Malley

Little Red Riding Hood Does Over the Big Bad Wolf by Wendy O'Malley is one of the two runners-up in the New Zealand Listener's Brothers Grimm story-writing competition.

In the words of Judge Kate de Goldi:

Little Red Riding Hood Does Over the Big Bad Wolf, which I enjoyed enormously for its bogun-ish chutzpah: a young slightly macho, heftily comic motorcycle magazine editor is well gulled by a nymph in red lycra shorts while he is putting the Zumba – “the latest all-mountain bike in the Xtacy’s upcoming 2013 range” – through its paces. The story very nicely completes its modest intentions; it is well paced and structured, it invokes the comic lesson-in-humility of some Grimm stories; the narrative voice plays most amusingly with political incorrectness and ends with a little metafictional flourish: the narrator reports from A&E: “I ponder this postmodern truth: a broken leg is but a small price to pay for a twist on a classic story like this.”

You can read the entire story on the site but here are the first few paragraphs to whet your interest. From Little Red Riding Hood Does Over the Big Bad Wolf by Wendy O'Malley:

Once upon a time, there was a big bad wolf that got done over by Little Red Riding Hood. That was Bonk’s headline. I am writing this editorial from the hospital waiting room where I ended up due to no virtue of my own. I’m not one to assign blame where it’s due, but this time I can squarely point my middle digit at my mates Bonk and Dare.

It started in the Man Cave where our sordid adventures usually take form out of beer-slurred boastings that morph into “frack, there’s no backing out now” scenarios. As editor of Xtreme Magazine NZ, it is my duty (in other words job) to risk my neck, recording the levels of danger and thrill on diverse adventures, for the benefit of my adrenalin-addicted readership. It is Bonk and Dare’s job as field writers to assist me in my lunacy and to come up with new insane ideas when my brain bucket is empty.

So it was on this murky morning at our editorial meeting in the Man Cave, as we combed our brains for something original and edgy that we hadn’t already written about. I was adjusting the shocks on the Zumba, the latest all-mountain bike in the Xtacy’s upcoming 2013 range. As part of their marketing strategy, the major bike companies sent us a bike to trial and review, and then pack up and send to the next magazine’s HQ.

They had us by the hairy bits, though. If we wrote a scathing review, we could kiss their advertising goodbye. So we had to sneak our true opinions in by using code words that only our hard-core readers could decipher. If we wrote that the bike was kick butt on a technical descent, that was code for “kick its butt off the cliff and save your time and money, mate”.