The Bloody Chamber - Carter, AngelaSummary: Combining the erotic and the sinister, the lyrical and the grisly, and the comic and the demonic, these twelve stories are startling transformations of such classic children's tales as Bluebeard's Castle and Beauty and the Beast.
Los Angeles Review of Books
What if Little Red Riding Hood seduced the wolf? What if one of Bluebeard’s wives turned the tables on her murderous husband, and lived to tell the tale? What if Beauty’s father lost her to the Beast at cards? The English writer Angela Carter (1940-1992) answered these questions in The Bloody Chamber (1979), a story collection that changed literary fiction for good. Tilting the fairy tale to refract new light from its facets of sex, wonder, and grief has become a welcome strategy for writers in the last decade, from Tin House’s “Fantastic Women” issue to Kate Bernheimer’s anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me to the work of Karen Russell, Aimee Bender, and Kelly Link, and gems like Lorrie Moore’s “The Juniper Tree.” But Angela Carter marked this path for all of us. Rooted in literature, folklore, and history — alive to their enchantments and general bloodiness — she was able to metabolize them into a new kind of fruit, borne on a profuse and fascinating tree.
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