A brutal retelling of well-known fairytales that end in any way but happily ever after. With explicit connections between violence and sexuality, this collection makes a powerful statement about womanhood and the falsehoods of those fairytale stories in reality. ( )

Gothic dark fairytales, with descriptive prose that paints the visuals for someone who lacks imagination? Yes, this hits all the right spots for me. ( )

The Bloody Chamber - The first and titular story of the collection was quite disturbing, but beautiful all the same. All of Angela Carter's writing is beautiful and I really felt like I just understood this one. It's a retelling of Bluebeard which I didn't actually know the plot of and wouldn't have recognized without looking it up. So, I don't know how it compares to the original story but this was definitely the best of the collection and I think it was the longest as well.

The Courtship of Mr Lyon - This was the first of two Beauty and the Beast stories. I liked this one slightly better although I thought that the ending was a little rushed maybe. In this Beauty and the Beast story, Beauty's father steals a rose and so the Beast tells him to bring Beauty to have dinner with him at his house and she does and stays there out of obligation while the Beast helps her father regain his wealth. Eventually she leaves and promises to come back but gets distracted by her new wealth and almost returns too late. I tend to like Beauty and the Beast and once again Carter's writing was beautiful.

The Tiger's Bride - In this Beauty and the Beast story, Beauty's father looses her to the Beast at cards and the Beast just wants to see Beauty naked... eventually she does reveal herself to him and stays with him and is a beast as well? I found this one kind of confusing and didn't like any of the characters. It was definitely more unique than the first but I just didn't like it as much. There was also some abrasive licking that made my skin itch,

Puss-in-Boots - Similarly to Bluebeard, I don't think I'd ever read a Puss-in-Boots story before... This one was fine. Puss helps his Master get with a pretty lady in a tower even though she's married. I do appreciate hearing from a cat's perspective I guess.

The Erl-King - This was probably my second favorite story after The Bloody Chamber. I had never heard of the story this is based off before, but I really enjoyed it, especially the ending. In a weird way it kind of reminded me of Hansel and Gretel but just with Gretel and the Witch who in this case would be the Erl-King. (He's not a witch... more of a forest spirit/fairy/monster).

The Snow Child - This one was only two pages long but it still somehow managed to be the worst in the collection. There was necrophilia/pedophilia involved and I simply could have gone without. I mean obviously the two main characters the Count and his wife were meant to be awful so I can maybe understand what it was going for but the disgusting bits ruined this story for me and there wasn't enough of anything else to really redeem it for me.

The Lady in the House of Love - A vampire lady lives alone with her nurse until a young man comes and I guess she turns human and dies. This one was okay I guess, but it was when reading this one that I noticed just how often virginity is mentioned. Why does every story have to mention that somebody is a virgin over and over again... It's such a tiresome trope. Sometimes I think it's definitely okay and can make sense, but in almost every story.... Idk. This one had some interesting bits about how the young man is also fighting in a war that he comes from and then returns to after the events of the story but I don't really know what to make of that..

The Werewolf - This was a Little Red Riding Hood retelling. I do like Little Red Riding Hood stories but in this one and the next there was a lot of chopping off the limbs of wolves and that just makes me kind of sad. Red Riding Hood is a badass here and chops off the wolf's paw only to find that it was her grandma who was a werewolf. I kind of liked the Salem Witch Trial vibes of this one. It was okay I guess but it mostly just made me sad.

The Company of Wolves - This was another sort of Red Riding Hood story, but also not. I appreciate the details about how if you burn a werewolf's clothing they will remain a werewolf forever. That is one of my favorite pieces of werewolf lore and I think it is sorely underutilized. It reminds me of the Lais of Marie de France's werewolves which I like a lot. However, even though I read this just last night maybe 10 hours ago I already forgot most of it. I think a woman marries a man who disappears (because he is a werewolf) so she gets remarried and has kids but then the first husband finally returns and gets mad. Something like that...

Wolf-Alice - This one was possibly the weirdest in the collection and the most difficult to follow. I thought it was a weak end to the collection. A girl is raised as a wolf even though she's human and she works for a duke and grows up and... I honestly don't really know what happened. Maybe I could reread it but I was also pretty drained at this point. Regardless, I think this was one of the weaker stories of the collection and could have been cut (along with The Snow Child). ( )

Lurid and grown-up retellings of folktale tropes, with feminist updates, by an author I'd never heard of until Backlisted. ( )

Postmodern, feminist, and psychosexual retellings of fairy tales. It was a disappointing read, but through no fault of its own. At the time it must have been groundbreaking, today it's like that one kid in high school that's shocked, shocked, to discover that there are sex puns in Shakespeare.
I've just seen this too many times to be impressed by the overwrought prose and the psychological archetypes. I've seen that the wolf character from Into the Woods is traditionally played by the same actor as the prince character. I sat through Red Riding Hood that one time. But to be fair these are imitators of the original. It's not Angela Carter's fault that we've had three decades of ironic fairy tale adaptations to water down her message.
I imagine that Anne Rice is in a similar predicament. She did sexy vampires before they were cool, but still Lestat is less famous then Edward Cullen. ( )

Just read the first story (The Bloody Chamber) itself but wow it's really powerful and scary and sinister with an incredible atmosphere of oppression and withheld violence and a lot of suspense even though it's likely you know what's going to happen from the start. What stood out to me was a bit in the middle which breaks open the suppressed violence when she opens the book of art showing sadistic, violent, murderous paintings - the description is suddenly very explicit. I feel deeply creeped out after reading it, it's really good

None of the others blew me away quite like the first one did (although to be fair it's the longest story in the collection) but I definitely enjoyed them a lot. They're either retellings of or strongly influenced by fairy tales - for most of them it's obvious what it's based on very quickly but it's either told very well bringing out undercurrents and ideas in the original stories you wouldn't have thought about before or with a different take on it. The only odd one is "The Courtship of Mr Lyon" which seems like a really straight version of Beauty and the Beast but I'm probably missing some stuff with that. The themes of misogyny, objectification of women, virginity, etc crop up a lot. The stories generally have a sinister/gothic/surreal vibe except for Puss in Boots which is humorous and bawdy. Her descriptions are really good at evoking an atmosphere although she uses a lot of really obscure words and I was glad to be reading on an ereader so I could look stuff up easily heh. Sorry for kind of shallow review but I liked it ( )

I liked about half of the stories in the book, the ones that read more like Gothic horror. However, even in the stories I preferred they seemed to get bogged down with a tangle of language especially in the Erl-King. Considering the book's only about 150 pages long it took me quite a while to get through it though I'm glad I read it as some of the later stories in the book definitely had a grim-fairy-tale-dream type of atmosphere (particularly The Lady of the House of Love and the Company of Wolves). I can't say I'd recommend it to anyone but I would say it IS worth reading. ( )

Angela Carter has a new fan in me. Amazing stuff and I can’t believe it took me this long to find her. ( )

I enjoy finding a foundational text for a subtype, a classic that would never have been included on the 'classics' lists from my college days. So while this wasn't my absolute favorite book, I enjoyed reading it. I really like how committed the author is to the style, atmosphere, story; it does very much set a type and never shies away from that. The most interesting part was thinking of all the authors who've been compared to Carter in reviews and marketing blurbs, and seeing how different they are. All that's needed is a woman examining stories, a woman who creates an atmosphere... a woman, writing. I'm not sure I've ever seen an author highlighted in a blurb that really makes sense as a comparison in a meaningful way, so no I'm not surprised. But it's gratifying to know that even within this delimited type, there is a great variety of voices. ( )

I liked some of the stories quite a bit...others were meh...some felt unfinished.

When I lived in Ireland, I took a module called Contemporary Women’s Writing, and the first book we covered was this one – perhaps Angela Carter’s best known work. The Bloody Chamber is a very straightforward idea, really: it takes popular fairy tales and twists them around, giving them a new focus and a new background. Some of the stories, even if not actually popular fairy tales, are written in a way that suggests the fantasy and spectacle of fairy tales, but they’re just a little bit darker than they usually would be.

There are ten short stories within the collection, varying in length but holding the same amount of strangeness to them. Some of them aren’t as directly based on fairy tales as others are, like The Lady of the House of Love, which is more of a vampire story than anything else. But some of them, like The Company of Wolves, are a direct retelling of Red Riding Hood with the feminist twist towards the end.

These stories are important because they give a new perspective, as I mentioned earlier. Most of these stories choose to focus on the woman and her intelligence, her skills and abilities, rather than the people who are trying to save her or do the right thing around her. The Bloody Chamber, for example, is based on the story of Bluebeard, and takes place in the mid-twentieth century, with the woman not only cheating on her husband and then finding out about his cruel past, but also having her mother save her in the end, rather than her brothers who get suspicious of her not answering their messages.

In Puss in Boots, the story is told by the cat, who helps his master bed a beautiful young bride of a cruel old Duke, and then helps them run away together. The cat is a wonderful narrator – this is probably one of my favourite stories in the collection – and he provides a unique perspective, especially on human emotions. Below, in the Quotes I Liked section, you’ll see one of the quotes that I most liked from the collection is from the cat’s perspective.

The story The Company of Wolves is one I not only had to study, but also write an in-depth language analysis on in my second year at university. This short story implies that the wolf in question is actually a lycanthrope, and that they are _targeting the young girl for their meal. She, however, is a young woman who has only recently come to realize what it means to have any kind of sexual feelings, and therefore uses these to her own advantage against the wolf. While you can argue that this is rather sexist – trust the woman to use sex to get her way – it is also showing how empowering it can be to claim your body back from a situation that could easily turn into rape, and take control of that situation.

This is a wonderful collection of short stories for those who are feminists, interested in literature written by women, or even really interested in fairy tales. Carter really did put a lot into this work, and a lot of research that any literature student can definitely appreciate.

Final rating: 4.5/5 – Not all the stories in the collection are winners, but most of them are! ( )

Carter doesn't really add much to the source fairy tales — her settings are more or less the same, her characters just as archetypal, the sexiness and bloodiness just marginally more visible than in Grimm. The prose here is relentlessly baroque, marzipan-like, cloying, a surfeit of Gothicness that I probably would have liked when I was 15. And yet there's a samey feel to it, too, produced by the re-use of a few images — roses, jewels, aristocratic men who smell funny. My favourite was probably Puss in Boots, written in an alleycat idiom that made me smile. I am looking forward to reading more Carter, though — I've really enjoyed one or two of her short stories in anthologies and I think the fairy tale theme dragged this book down for me. ( )

This collection of 10 stories is dark, very dark. Each of them takes a folk tale or fairy tale that you know the outline of and subverts it. In each there is a significant element of transformation or things being between states. Is she describing a wolf or a human is a typical ambiguity in these. Things are not necessarily what they appear.
There is quite a lot of blood and a reasonable amount of sex - be that implied or actual. It's not necessarily out of keeping, just be warned that these fairy tale retellings are not at all bright and shiny - expect to go to the dark places in the human psyche.
I liked the way that the collection was grouped such that the same story got reworked more than once with a different outcome and from a different perspective. You can tell Beauty and the Beast such that Beauty wins the Beast and he becomes a man, but why not tell it the other way round?
Excellent, but not exactly what you might call bedtime reading. ( )

I don't usually rate books that I do not finish, but the two stories I read were that bad so I am opening an exception. I read two stories and a half and that was all I could take.

This book is known for darker versions of fairy tales, but I think the correct word is disgusting. Not dark exactly. I think there is a difference.
I also heard that this is supposedly feminist, but after reading about a girl getting raped with the approval of another woman and another girl happily killing her grandmother I was like the famous slow blink guy gif. Honestly, do people even know what the word feminist means? Because every time a book is marketed like that there seems to be women hating on other women.
The writing was a mess. The stories I read until the end were so short that it wasn't as noticeable, but the one I left unfinished jumped from first person to second to third in each paragraph. Wth was that? Pick one! The sentences are so long and confusing that I quickly forgot what the author was on about. All I know is that it wasn't anything important.

Unfortunately, I own this book and it does have a pretty cover. I need to get rid of it though. In the meantime I will just hide it somewhere so I don't have to look at it and get angry.
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This collection is a group of fairy tales, rewritten, reimagined, and given the sensual, sexual connotations that are only implied in the originals. They are not lewd, they are tactile. These are stories as familiar as our childhood beds, but these are not fairy tales for children.

The Bloody Chamber is a retelling of Perrault’s Bluebeard fairy tale. I had recently read a collection of stories by Margaret Atwood in which this story was retold, so it was interesting to contrast what the two authors did with the same tell. Angela Carter has a marvelous skill for describing the eerie and setting the mood, and she is all suggestion and atmosphere.

“Soon”, he said in his resonant voice that was like the tolling of a bell, and I felt, all at once, a sharp premonition of dread that lasted only as long as the match flared and I could see his white, broad face as if it were hovering, disembodied, above the sheets, illuminated from below like a grotesque carnival head.

We know our lady is in peril from the outset, but we little expect how the rest of her story will unfold. Carter is inventive.

I particularly enjoyed the next two tales, The Courtship of Mr. Lyon and The Tiger’s Bride. Both are retellings of Beauty and the Beast, with The Tiger’s Bride being a reverse tale in which the girl changes into a beast at the end, rather than the other way around. It is not the only reversal in the tale, and the contrasts were beautifully conceived and executed. Both have the rose of virginity, the sexual desire of the heroine exploited, the them of inner darkness, the insecurity of the beast, and the poor girl who is traded by her father to regain his lost fortune. What is amazing is how differently she constructs the plot elements, so that the tales, while essentially the same, are so vastly different. This isn't Disney's Belle.

My father, of course, believed in miracles; what gambler does not?

I drew the curtains to conceal the sight of my father’s farewell, my spite was sharp as broken glass.

A few less captivating, but well-written, tales follow: Puss in Boots; The Snow Child (which I found a bit disturbing); The Lady of the House of Love (a vampire tale); The Erl King (a tale of seduction and enlightenment); and Wolf-Alice.

Then another pair of tales that turn Little Red Riding Hood on its head. The Werewolf which has a sinister twist of betrayal, with the Grandmother paying the price, and The Company of Wolves which has Red submitting to sex with the wolf, which wins the day.

These stories served as bedtime fare for me, but they are far from being soothing or sleep-inducing. If you are not careful, they will, rather, induce nightmares.



( )

Gothic retellings of familiar fairy tales. Definitely more horror than happy ever after. ( )

One of my eternal favorites. Beautiful, intricate, slightly anachronistic style of writing, which is always perfectly in place and never ever pretentious. ( )

The Bloody Chamber [3/5]
The Courtship of Mr Lyon [2/5]
The Tiger's Bride [4/5]
Puss-in-Boots [4/5]
The Erl-King [3/5]
The Snow Child [2/5]
The Lady of the House of Love [4/5]
The Werewolf [1/5]
The Company of Wolves [2/5]
Wolf-Alice [2/5]

Well that was a very random assortment of bits. A mix of the more disney-like folktales and the more supernatural aspects of folklore. A lot of them do just feel like unfinished scraps.

Three really good pieces though made it worth the price of admission. ( )

Wicked twisted fairy tales for adults only. Some of these will be familiar, however I'm not sure if all these are derived from real folk and fairy tales, but it doesn't matter because it seems like they are. Carter releases these type of stories from the often simpering but always patriarchal prison they have been kept in for so long.

These are tales to be told, read out loud. We know that the oral tradition of storytelling probably followed a matriarchal path. But when folk stories finally got written down it was probably men that did the writing. That's the problem. Men altered the tales to conform to a male dominated mindset. Carter puts the women back in the stories the way they probably originally were. At the same time she updates the the milieu just enough to make them seem fresh and new as well. Frightening or funny. I never laugh out-loud when I read, but I did during Puss-in-Boots. Funniest story I've read in a long time.

And the prose itself. Carter is a true artist with the English language. The words so literate and evocative with out being too purple. A perfect pallet of words There are only a few authors that I think get close: Peake, Burgess, Davies, Aickman. ( )

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter sounds right up my alley. Dark and subversive versions of fairy tales and legends told in the gothic tradition? Sign me up! I was so confident I would fall in love with this collection of short stories, I used a Christmas gift voucher to source a stunning little hardback edition back in January 2019. Since then, it's been sitting on my shelves while I enjoyed the anticipation of an automatic 5 star read within my reach. Recently I decided I was in the mood for some short stories - which doesn't happen often - and it was finally time to enjoy the collection. Sadly, I was quite disappointed.

The writing is superb, there's no doubt about that. And I'll never look at a cat or a ham bone in the same way again after this description from the Puss-In-Boots story:

"I went about my ablutions, tonguing my arsehole with the impeccable hygienic integrity of cats, one leg stuck in the air like a ham bone; I choose 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?" Page 114 Puss-In-Boots

Saving this quote to include in my review and re-reading it again now, I'm once again stunned that this wasn't a great reading experience. I'm going to be giving this collection 3 stars, but how is that even possible with writing like this?

"It is winter and cold weather. In this region of mountain and forest, there is now nothing for the wolves to eat. Goats and sheep are locked up in the byre, the deer departed for the remaining pasturage on the southern slopes - wolves grow lean and famished. There is so little flesh on them that you could count the starveling ribs through their pelts, if they gave you time before they pounced. Those slavering jaws; the lolling tongue; the rime of saliva on the grizzled chops - of all the teeming perils of the night and the forest, ghosts, hobgoblins, ogres that grill babies upon gridirons, witches that fatten their captives in cages for cannibal tables, the wolf is worst for he cannot listen to reason." Page 186 The Company of Wolves

As you can see, Carter's writing is thought provoking and often made me stop to reflect. That was certainly the case when reading the last story in the collection about a girl raised by wolves:

"Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair." Page 202 Wolf-Alice

There's much to dissect in this relatively short collection, but I'm certain that many of the fairytale references went way over my head. Angela Carter died in 1992, so thankfully I don't have to worry that she'll ever see this review and disapprove of my meagre criticisms, but geez, how many hyphens and semi colons do you need? At one point I put the book down to Google 'angela carter semi colons' and was reassured to find I'm not the only reader who finds it a tad excessive.

I loved the writing style in The Bloody Chamber and even relished having to put the book down to expand my vocabulary by looking up a new-to-me word. However, I found the stories to be a little too obscure for my overall enjoyment. While reading this, I made a note that if I'd been studying it in a university setting, breaking it down and analysing the literary references cleverly contained within, I'd be writing a completely different review.

Read in isolation though, I enjoyed the language and the gothic undertones on every page, but overall, this collection never took me to the dizzying literary classic heights I had expected to reach. ( )

It’s probably a bit hard to separate this collection from the impact it had when it was originally published and the various critiques of it that have followed. I tried to put all that aside (indeed I gave reading the foreword which seemed keen to spoil the stories for me) and read it instead as a collection of horror and dark fantasy tales. On that level it really delivers, the stories are rich and enjoyable, the prose sometimes dark and sometimes playful. Carter’s reinvention of various folk tales is enormously effective, as she surfaces the dark and sexual nature of them.
My favourite was the title story, which reads a bit like Edgar Allan Poe doing 50 Shades and is so packed with horrific, macabre imagery it’s dizzying. Also great were the ribald retelling of Puss in Boots and Carter’s various takes on werewolf legends.
All in all this is a marvellous set of stories, whether you take them to be rich with meaning or just enjoyably gruesome tales.
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A classic feminist take on fairy tales. Something that I'd been anticipating reading and thought for certain I'd enjoy. I will confess that this isn't my favourite look at fairy tales. One contributing factor may be that I've read a lot of versions both 'originals' and retakes and what maybe would have been new (in my younger years) I've now seen before.

Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely glad I got the chance to immerse myself in the rhythm of her words and I will most likely revisit this again (maybe even regularly - as I suspect I'll get more from a reread).

"The Bloody Chamber" was one of my favourites of this set. (the protagonist's mother for the win! I couldn't see her feeling in any way ashamed of an indelible red mark on her forehead - rather I imagine she'd see it as a sign of victory) ( )

Feminist, psychological reinterpretations of Grimms’ fairy tales, most of which are primarily concerned with carnality—women’s bodies and the animalistic nature of people are primary themes. Blood and sex, always implicit in fairy tales, are made much more explicit. But women have much more agency than they do in traditional tales and are generally the characters of primary concern. Some stories were downright amusing (“Puss in Boots,” for one), but most were eerie and unsettling. The ending of “The Company of Wolves” (a Carterian take on “Little Red Riding Hood”) took me quite by surprise, though given the themes of blood, sex, and self-determining women, it really shouldn’t have. Altogether an intriguing and enjoyable collection. ( )

Adult short stories; modern fairy tales. I wanted to like this but the amusing stories were destroyed by the author's frequent use of fancy and complicated language, as though trying to prove herself as an intelligent woman. The effect of these unwanted trills and supercilious ornaments is to disrupt what otherwise might be captivating, lyrical prose--having to stop and think every few minutes, "why the hell would she choose to express herself THAT way?" certainly makes it hard to focus on anything else--indeed, the critical reviews at the front of the book talk of little else, since there isn't really anything particularly praiseworthy to say about the collection. On the other hand, if you know a Literature major that is constantly annoying people with similar quirks of phrase, this would be something She would probably enjoy. ( )

These were interesting and engaging retellings (reimaginings?) of classic fairy/folk tales. The narration was good and I quite liked the way it was split between 2 narrators so it was easy to follow where one story ended and the next began. I particularly liked the way they were set in the middle ground between Grimm's and Disney; they didn't have happy endings, per se, but they definitely didnt have sad endings either.

A very interesting collection, and well read by the narrators. (Listened to on Audible) ( )