The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Sensual, Beautiful, Graphic Fairy Tale Horror The Bloody Chamber (1979) by Angel Carter is a collection of ten vivid, sensual, beautiful, and brutal short stories inspired by classic fairy tale or horror motifs. The title story (at over 40 pages the longest work in the collection) is a lush, disturbing, and suspenseful Bluebeard tale, with a feminist slant and a detailed French fin-de-siecle setting. “I know it must seem a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me like a lily. Yes. A lily. Possessed of that strange, ominous calm of a sentient vegetable, like one of those cobra-headed, funereal lilies whose white sheaths are curled out of a flesh as thick and tensely yielding to the touch as vellum.” Then follow two retellings of the beauty and the beast motif, the straightforward and poignant adherence to the plot in “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” set in contemporary London and the wonderful reversal of the plot in “The Tiger’s Bride” set in southern Italy. “And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs.” The one comedy in the collection, “Puss-in-Boots,” is a bawdy memoir told by the pragmatic, randy, egotistical, raconteur cat, who, when not washing his privates or singing for rotten vegetables and assorted footwear, takes charge of a down and out cavalry officer in Bergamo. “I went about my ablutions, tonguing my arsehole with the impeccable hygenic integrity of cats, one leg stuck in the air like a ham bone; I chose to remain silent. Love? What has my rakish master, for whom I’ve jumped through the window of every brothel in the city, besides haunting the virginal back garden of the convent and god knows what other goatish errands, to do with the tender passion?” “The Erl-King” is a densely poetic psychological story of the conflicting desires of the female narrator to yield her self to love a forest spirit/goblin given to keeping song birds in cages or to save her self by escaping from him in a weird ending switching from first to third person). “He knows which of the frilled, blotched, rotted fungi are fit to eat; he understands their eldritch ways, how they spring up overnight in lightless places and thrive on dead things. Even the homely wood blewits, that you cook like tripe, with milk and onions, and the egg-yolk yellow chanterelle with its fan-vaulting and faint scent of apricots, all spring up overnight like bubbles of earth, unsustained by nature, existing in a void. And I could believe that it has been the same with him; he came alive from the desire of the woods.” “The Snow Child” is a two-page story, an incantatory, hallucinatory alternate “Snow White,” including necrophiliac rape and a rose that bites. “As soon as he completed her description, there she stood, beside the road, white skin, red mouth, black hair and stark naked; she was the child of his desire and the Countess hated her.” “The Lady of the House of Love” is an absorbing and unsettling vampiric “The Lady of Shallot.” “Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she counts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly construing a constellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into a country of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.” Three werewolf stories close the collection: “The Werewolf” (in which Little Red Riding Hood is no innocent and the werewolf, perhaps, no werewolf), “The Company of Wolves” (in which Little Red Riding Hood is no innocent and the marriage ceremony consists of picking and eating lice), and “Wolf-Alice” (in which a girl raised by wolves is taken from them and given into the careless care of a lycanthropic Duke). “Then her sensitive ears pricked at the sound of a step in the hall; trotting at once back to her kitchen, she encountered the Duke with the leg of a man over his shoulder. Her toenails clicked against the stairs as she padded incuriously past, she, the serene, inviolable one in her absolute and verminous innocence.” The stories are about love and sexuality (especially female) and the pleasure, annihilation, or new life they may bring. To the extent that they are feminist tales, they depict female characters who refuse to become victims, as when Red Riding Hood, faced with the wolf who’s just eaten her grandmother, “burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat.” Carter’s writing is lush, vivid, sensual, painterly, poetic, dense. At times it almost (but not quite) becomes too much, like overeating expensive bitter dark chocolate truffles. As they read alternate stories in the collection, Emilia Fox and Richard Armitage are both clear, intelligent, and sensitive. My only concern might be that Armitage camps it up a fair amount doing the r rolling feline narrator of Puss-in-Boots. Readers who like modern fairy tales, luscious writing, horror and romance, should like The Bloody Chamber. View all my reviews
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