A review by maises
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter

dark emotional tense slow-paced

3.75

Pedantic, moony, run-on sentences galore!!! I am glad I finished this just on time within the span of autumn. I take “fairy tale with a twist” stories with a tiny itty bitty grain of salt, but Carter is kind of the blueprint here. I think I just enjoy how well she crafts atmosphere (which is arguably easy to do when you write walls of description as she does). Except there were times where I had to pause in my suspension of belief and sigh at how abstract the prose got for certain stories—not because it was bad, but because I just totally lost what was happening narratively when it got that whimsical. A few of them were just sort of there and I had no real opinion, other than appreciating her construction of words. I guess. Still, it was always entertaining because most stories were hard to predict. 

My top three:
“The Lady of the House of Love” (if I was rating this short story alone, 5 stars) 
“The Bloody Chamber” 
“The Courtship of Mr Lyon”

Special mentions to “The Company of Wolves” (same as the movie) and “Wolf-Alice”. Carter really didn’t care much for anything but wolves by the end, it seems. I liked Puss-in-Boots on principal, but to be honest with you I can’t even begin to describe the plot of it. Or remember. 

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The Lady of the House of Love by Angela Carter

“Be he alive or be dead
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”

I just wanted to log this in as a separate entry from Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, because this was the standout for me. Five stars. Before getting to this point in Bloody Chamber, Carter really does warm you up to her fanciful and overrunning sentences to prime you for The Lady of the House of Love. It is about Nosferatu’s daughter who lives alone with an attendant in a dark and gloomy castle, when an innocent country boy is lured into her grounds for feeding. He is, however, unaffected on a whole by her glamours or beauty. I find this part of the story most charming, specifically when the Lady begins to loosen her hold, and perhaps finds herself on the other end of what she usually upends onto men. This is a beautiful vampiric love story, however short a night together, and however unrequited. It is very sweet.

[…] she is like a doll, he thought, a ventriloquist's doll, or, more, like a great, ingenious piece of clockwork. For she seemed inadequately powered by some slow energy of which she was not in control; as if she had been wound up years ago, when she was born, and now the mechanism was inexorably running down and would leave her lifeless. This idea that she might be an automaton, made of white velvet and black fur, that could not move of its own accord, never quite deserted him; indeed, it deeply moved his heart.

[…] if he presented himself to her naked face, he would dazzle her like the sun she is forbidden to look at because it would shrivel her up at once, poor night bird, poor butcher bird.

Vous serez ma proie.

You have such a fine throat, m'sieu, like a column of marble. When you came through the door retaining about you all the golden light of the summer's day of which I know nothing, nothing, the card called 'Les Amoureux' had just emerged from the tumbling chaos of imagery before me; it seemed to me you had stepped off the card into my darkness and, for a moment, I thought, perhaps, you might irradiate it.

I am condemned to solitude and dark; I do not mean to hurt you.

I will be very gentle.

She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man's land between life and death, sleeping and waking, behind the hedge of spiked flowers, Nosferatu's sanguinary rose-bud. The beastly forebears on the walls condemn her to a perpetual repetition of their passions.