By BETHANY BLITZ

Staff Writer

Imagine if the Pied Piper was a slave driver who turned kids into zombies, if Peter Pan abducted children or if Little Red Riding Hood was actually the one who wanted to kill Grandma.

The eighth-graders at Post Falls Middle School let their imaginations run wild with the creative writing challenge to turn a fairytale into a horror story.

Paul Mauel, an English teacher at the school, turned the assignment into a competition. The students spent about three weeks of class working on their stories and were encouraged to work on them at home. At the end of three weeks, students presented their stories to their class and each class voted on the top three stories.

“The stories were fantastic,” Mauel said. “They put so much energy into it and it’s great to see what they did when I wasn’t watching. It’s easy to get kids to work on something in class, but how much time they spent on it at home, that’s exciting.”

Part of the Twisted Fairy Tales Short Story unit — which was spearheaded by teacher Jordan Ramsey and River City Middle School vice principal Emily Wells — involved a lot of reading and research for stories.

Mauel said he was proud of his students because they all stepped outside the box and pushed themselves with this assignment.

Emma Galli spun a story combining Nightingale and the Pied Piper of Hamelin. She was so excited about her story, she went into great detail with The Press about it. The Nightingale bird is actually a girl with a beautiful voice who gets abducted by the Pied Piper, along with all the other kids in the town.

The girl frees the kids with her voice, but the Pied Piper turns them all into zombies.

Darius Rogers wrote a story about Little Red Riding Hood who was going to kill her grandma so the wolf went to stop her, but ended up killing both Red and Grandma.

Rogers said his favorite part of the assignment was figuring out how he was going to “twist” the story.

“When I finished it, I surprised myself,” he said. “It really wrote itself.”

The top three stories from each of Mauel’s five classes were:

SECOND PERIOD First Place: Cameron Rotchford with The Little Mermaid. Second Place: Morgan Clay with Snow White and the Flesh Eating Dwarves. Third Place: Will Slyfield with Diablo Rewritten.

THIRD PERIOD (HONORS) First Place: Emily McMullen with Cinderella. Second Place: Aidan Headley with Peter’s Revenge. Third PLace: Dalanie Morgan with The Little Mermaid.

FOURTH PERIOD First Place: Emma Galli with A Bagpipe and a Voice. Second Place: Jenaya Twite with Alice in Wonderland. Third Place: Jaiden Eberly with Frozen Hearted.

FIFTH PERIOD First Place: Darius Rogers with The Bloody Hood. Second Place: Rylee Keyser with Lil Red Running Through the Hood. Third Place: Kilynn Carr with Little Red Riding Hood.

SIXTH PERIOD First Place: Shelby Trejos with Hansel and Gretel. Second Place: Peter Taus with Berz. Third Place: Ethan Brownlee with The Three Bears.

“The stories are really cool displays of creativity and description,” Mauel said. “The sky’s the limit for these kids as far as writing goes.”