The Cobweb Bride by Vera Nazarian

The Cobweb Bride is a mysteriously strange but fascinating cross between The Masque of the Red Death, Cinderella, and  a Tolkien-esque quest.

Death, or the lack of it, prompts a number of stories--two royal houses (one plagued by revenge) and two warring dukedoms, a peasant household full of pettiness and broken dreams . . . sometimes with amazing surprises, and often with the stark straightforward narrative of a novel from Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy.
This is a macabre fairytale that haunts the reader, and in the end of the first book of this trilogy, the writer leaves you with a sense of endless possibility.