Review - The Bloody Chamber
Sep. 4th, 2009 03:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wilderthanThe short stories in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber are all based on fairy-tales, all more or less familiar -- although I couldn't call one of them to mind until I looked it up. She modernised them in places, tugged them and twisted them a bit, but they're still basically recognisable. Some of them she had more than one go at -- Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood.
The writing is amazing, rich and intricate. Sometimes a little too much so, I think, like the beginning of The Erl-King. There was hardly room to figure out what was going on between description. A lot of the imagery was bright, startling, brilliant, but it was very tightly packed.
The stories themselves... I'm not sure I really liked them. I found them interesting, and I liked the way they played with the original stories, but they weren't comfortable, weren't something I really wanted to read, I guess. Still, I'm glad I read it -- the little twists on the stories, the ways she brought women to the foreground -- that's interesting, and important.
The writing is amazing, rich and intricate. Sometimes a little too much so, I think, like the beginning of The Erl-King. There was hardly room to figure out what was going on between description. A lot of the imagery was bright, startling, brilliant, but it was very tightly packed.
The stories themselves... I'm not sure I really liked them. I found them interesting, and I liked the way they played with the original stories, but they weren't comfortable, weren't something I really wanted to read, I guess. Still, I'm glad I read it -- the little twists on the stories, the ways she brought women to the foreground -- that's interesting, and important.
