A review by yourfriendtorie
Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces by Angela Carter

4.0

I realized that there are pieces of Angela Carter's writing, which I have only discovered in her short stories, where her prose takes on a florid, swooning quality similar to that of Anais Nin's, whose writing I don't appreciate. It annoyed me to no end that one of my favorite writers was revealing this quality to me, but when I came to the last few stories in the book (Master, Reflections, and Elegy for a Freelance), at last the Ms. Carter I love arrived. Her fangs came out, so to speak. In her storytelling, she is at her best plying a kind of gothic surrealism. "We live in gothic times," she writes in the afterword. And it was like she was speaking to me from beyond the grave, here in 2007, as San Diego is on fire, and beyond, the state of the world is like a bad dream.