Once upon a time there was a girl living in a wood. Or a cowherd’s youngest son. Or a prince seeking adventure. Or a malevolent witch. The details may change, but the impulses guiding the telling of fairy tales remain the same. She will be beautiful, and he will be handsome, and evil will be vanquished and they will live happily ever after. But within this overarching narrative is a kaleidoscope of possibilities. Shake the tube, and a different glittering tale is formed. And this reforming has happened again and again; throughout human history, from neolithic campfires to the sugary technicolor of Disney, fairy and folk tales have formed an essential part of the way we see and understand the world.

November, A. S. Byatt tells us in her fairy tale-suffused novel Possession, is the traditional Breton storytelling month. And as autumn shivers into winter, the idea of gathering round the fireside swapping tales has always seemed particularly attractive; in the chillier parts of the world, people have traditionally told stories to keep out the cold through the long winter months, with the black night just outside.

These stories have always been about more than mere entertainment, however. Almost all share a fascination with the unknown, with what lies just beyond the safe, flickering pumpkin-orange warmth of the hearth. What we know today as ‘fairy tales’ were once much less cosy than their prettified modern counterparts, which are invariably the result of a bowdlerising nineteenth century desire to make them suitable for children. Tales about the land of ‘faery’ in the original, otherworldly sense of the word deal with that uncertain, glimmering space between the safe human world and the supernatural. We tell and listen to these stories to learn how to cope with difficult situations, to confront our fears, and to understand what it means to be human.

Now, as the nights draw in and the Siberian winds whistle across East Anglia, is a good time to reread, or perhaps encounter for the first time, some of these stories which teeter between the sweet and the sinister; tales of snow queens, of girls in red hoods, of wolves, ice, darkness. The well-known stories of Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel offer their audiences a basket of grandmother-bound honey cakes and a house of marzipan, but also abandonment, danger, and the importance of being resourceful. Traditional Russian tales tell of the wise Vasilissa, who attracts the tsar with her weaving skills, but also of the sorceress Baba-Yaga, who lives in a house on chicken’s feet and flies around in a mortar and pestle. In medieval English romances, one can find stories of knights riding out into tangled forests to encounter shimmering, unearthly women who may or may not wish them harm, such as the Arthurian tale of Sir Lanval.

As well as traditional tales, many writers have reused and recast fairy tales in their work. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories offers feminist reworkings of traditional tales in gorgeous, eldritch prose, while, more recently, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and other fiction weave fairy tales, legends and mythologies together in impishly imaginative ways. In film, fairy tale imagery finds its way into Tim Burton’s cinematic world of striped stockings and cobweb-tinselled forests; this month, Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassuss uses the familiar motif of a man making a deal with the devil to dramatic big-screen effect.

So this winter, curl up by the fireside and lose yourself in the dark glitter of fairy tales. Just take care not to stray too far into the shadows outside.