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. ( )