Product Description

From familiar fairy tales and legends - Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves - Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #226 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Review
'Magnificent set pieces of fastidious sensuality' Ian McEwan 'Angela Carter has extended the life and richness of the fable form itself partly through language that is both pellucid and sensual, but chiefly through imagination of such Ariel reach that she can glide from ancient to modern, from darkness to luminosity, from depravity to comedy without any hint of strain and without losing the elusive power of the original tales' The Times 'The Bloody Chamber's interweaving of retold fairy tales demonstrates Angela Carter's narrative gift at its most mocking and seductive' Observer 'Extraordinary and beautiful' Peter Redgrove

From the Publisher
'One of the century's greatest writers' Sunday Times

About the Author
Angela Carter was born in 1940 and read English at Bristol University, before spending two years living in Japan. She lived and worked extensively in the United States and Australia. Her first novel, Shadow Dance, was published in 1965, followed by the Magic Toyshop in 1967, which went on to win the John Liewellyn Rhys Prize. She wrote a further four novels, together with three collections of Short Stories, two works of non-fiction and a volume of collected writings. Angela Carter died in 1992

Customer Reviews

Sense and Sensuality
I first came about this collection of stories through the inclusion of two of its works in the Neil Jordan film, the Company of Wolves. From this, I was immediately impressed and intrigued by Carter’s style of writing. In ‘the Company of Wolves’, we saw the ingenious juxtaposition between the varying mythologies of the fairy story, with the natural-sexual awakening of the adolescent. This is the defining factor of these works. Though the stories move from place to place to explore further myths and legends, it is this one consistent thread that anchors the stories together to create a unified work. The writer creates reoccurring motifs of love, lust and sexuality that give the stories a further narrative cohesion, despite being generally fragmented in terms of characters and scope.

The unity of the book, and the sustaining of the literary atmosphere, is also created through the varied textual forms that Carter chooses to chronicle. So, for her examinations here the writer hand-picks legends that have the strongest roots in sensuality... so we have vampirism, werewolves, feral children, and jungle beasts beguiling and defiling a succession of young women in a series of deeply emotional narrative episodes. To go into any great detail about these stories would be a great injustice to readers who are yet to experience Carter’s poetic use of language and deft storytelling capabilities. Needless to say, the stories featured drip with a dense, erotic atmosphere that is occasionally overwhelming... though there is also a strong underlining of horror, tension and mystery; with the reader free to read between the lines and decode the various clues that Carter layers within her work.

The author’s real genius though, is her ability to depict the more mundane aspects of life, and enrich them beyond the realms of everyday literature into a kind of Technicolor majesty through the use of poetic prose, self-referentialism, biblical quotations and more than a hint of metaphorical imagery. She also writes her stories in a beautiful stream of conscious style that is filled with richly constructed details, which brings to life every action in a completely vivid way to further develop the evocative world that is created especially for us. It’s an audacious device, but one that works exceptionally well with this kind of material... so because of this, the continual atmosphere of gothic gloom also helps to lull the reader into an almost hypnotic state in which Carter’s words can re-develop, in order to take on newer, more subjective meanings.

This book takes us on a beautiful, shocking and often frightening journey into realms of innocence and sensuality that few literary works can equate. Carter’s talent as a storyteller and as a poet are greatly under-appreciated by the so-called people in the know (how else can you explain her lack of inclusion in the Big Read’s Top 100?), and, when viewed in the context of this book, becomes something of a sad reminder of what a great talent we’ve lost. Thankfully, this book should succeed in opening your eyes to her genius, since it brilliantly demonstrates her various creative skills mirrored within each of these separate stories.

If you step off the path you will be lost forever.
Carter's re-writes of traditional European folk/fairy tales bring with them dark aspects of the human psyche that would have existed in the oral tradition but which became sanitised when written down in the 18th / 19th centuries as parables of instruction for children. In this collection Little Red Riding Hood (The Company of Wolves) is not saved by the woodcutter, but instead tames the beast by getting naked and giving vent to her awakening sexuality. Most of the stories in the collection focus on a girl on the cusp of womanhood, who steps off the path and is rewarded with the discovery of a sexuality that is not repressively phallocentric. Strong female protagonists contrast strongly with fairy tale stereotypes. Carter herself said that she was all for putting new wine in old bottles until the pressure of the new wine caused the old bottles to explode. That's about the best definition I can find for this collection of stories. Sexually provocative, gothic and sometimes very funny (Puss in Boots especially), The Bloody Chamber is a must-read book.

Beautifully sensuous fairy tales
This book contains a number of re-tellings and re-interpretations of classic fairy-tales. Some - like 'The Bloody Chamber' (Bluebeard) or Puss-in-Boots - are directly linked to one tale, others - like the 'Lady of the House of Love' - are amalgamations of various stories (Sleeping Beauty and the vampire myth) or yet again others ('The Erl-King') seem to have nothing to do with any tale (the story has little to nothing to do with Goethe's poem of the same name).

All of them however are told in a language that shows what you can do with English. The language is sumptuous and sensuous, a feast and delight. Carter is an epicurean with words and feeds them to the reader on a silver plate. She has the knack of finding descriptions that match the mood precisely. A rare artform, now as ever.

The stories themselves are all original and often told with sly humour and innuendo. These are not fairy tales for children, but are adult camera obscuras showing a world fairy tales attempt to paint over, a world of sudden and sharp loss of innocence, a loss inevitable and predictable, but surprising and poignant nevertheless.

A must have [and if you enjoy the book, try the film 'The Company of Wolves' which is based on the story by Carter of the same name].