One of the larger twists to Whitten’s retelling of the tale of Little Red Riding Hood is her revision of the Wolf, who is the antagonist of the classic fairy tale and initially appears as the antagonist of the novel, too. In Red’s world, the Wolf is the monster of the Wilderwood that devours Second Daughters. Legend and limited understanding have led outsiders to believe that, rather than serving as guardian of the wood and companion to Gaya, Ciaran had somehow caused Gaya’s murder and then demanded more Second Daughters as tribute. Red is initially told that the Wolf holds the Five Kings hostage, and her sacrifice as the Second Daughter, following the established ritual, is meant to propitiate the Wolf into releasing what the people of Valleyda and the rest of the realm consider their gods.

Instead, Red encounters a human-looking man who, rather than trying to devour her, advises her to return home. This moment of reversal and recognition is a plot twist loaded with a latent romantic charge, since Red notices from the outset that the dark-haired, human-looking young man is attractive. This moment also serves as the first challenge to the belief system that is all Red has known, with this initial reversal laying the ground for other reveals that further interrogate the nature of monstrosity. These revelations will lead Red to revise her understanding of what qualifies as truly monstrous.

Rather than the Wolf, the monsters of the book are the creatures imprisoned in the Shadowlands, whose poison rots the sentinels, infects humans like Bormain, and occasionally breaks through in the form of shadowy, misshapen creatures that can take on a human semblance. While the source or reason for this destructiveness is never explained, the very essence of the Shadowlands seems to be evil. While others revere them as gods, Eammon informs Red that the Five Kings aren’t something she would want released; his references imply that the Kings have become monstrous through their residence in the Shadowlands, but he also implies that they were corruptible from the start. The Kings were initially imprisoned because they resented their loss of power in the Binding and wanted to revise their bargain with the Wilderwood. As Eammon notes, the goal was to gain more power; he goes on to say, “People with power resent losing it, and too much power for too long a time can make a villain of anyone” (167). Misuse of power can be a monstrous quality, an argument furthered by the murder and mayhem that Solmir and Kiri commit while trying to free the other Kings.

However, power alone is not monstrous, as shown by Eammon’s defense of the Wilderwood. While his use of magic gives him supernatural powers and manifests in non-human attributes like the bark that grows on his wrists, these blurred boundaries between the human and natural worlds are not, in the book, inimical to human life. Rather, Solmir, with his ambition, and Kiri, with her willingness to sacrifice human life, are portrayed as the real monsters of the story. They are the antagonists who would upset the balance of both the natural and human world, which the others are trying to protect. Red’s self-perception as a god, at the end, suggests that monstrosity is not a matter of supra-human powers alone but an interpretation that takes into account the intentions and purposes to which those powers are applied, whether protective or destructive.