Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber is a set of short stories that parody the folk tale and legend. Let’s not beat around the bush. The bloody chamber in question is the vagina and the capital of these stories is sex. But they also reinterpret and rework fairy tales, myths, and legends so that the stories literally and explicitly acquire the adult qualification they always suggested.

There are wolves that transform into men and men that transform into wolves. Now there is versatility. One story, The Company Of Wolves, was actually made into a movie in the 1980s, when Angela Carter’s star shone.

The Bloody Chamber offers re-views on Dracula and Bluebeard. He breathes new life into Little Red Riding Hood and a lewd Puss in Boots. Here, Beauty meets the Beast and, through these time-honored characters and themes, Angela Carter explores sexuality, both reality and myth, from a female perspective. It describes the insecurity that arises from the threat and the fear engendered by anticipated violence. But he also revels in the power to control, to tempt, to become powerless through an overdose of ecstasy.

A hint of torture is always near. The Bloody Chamber inhabits spaces in the human psyche that are never far from pain, always flirting with sadism. From the pain of unrequited love to physical mutilation, the entire spectrum of torture seems to be beyond the pain of love. The boundary is often blurred in these stories, and some characters find extremes decidedly difficult.

But Angela Carter avoids mere gratuitous fantasy. We can all, if we have little imagination, describe women who change color (for one reason or another), grow green scales, grow fangs or claws, and then suck the blood of their lovers. These fantastic scenarios soon become not only repetitive, but also trivial and pointless if divorced from some ingrained parallelism of symbolism. In Angela Carter’s work, that link with a form of reality and experience always seems to be present. Folk tales and fairy tales persisted perhaps because of these links. Perhaps people never believed in its literal truth, but its images related to some, often hidden, aspects of experience or inner fear. Not all men are Bluebeards who imprison their wives in a state of eternal suffering. Not all men turn into werewolves and consume maidens. But not all husbands are always kind to their wife. Not all boys approach maids with delicacy.

Enhancing these stories is the very special prose of Angela Carter. It is far from silky smooth and seldom aspires to transparency. Rather, we are presented with a veritable brocade of language, a densely woven and complex pattern of allusion, pun, and metaphor. The texture is always concise, the sound often dissonant. As ideas collide, so does the language Angela Carter uses to start the fight. In some places, the density may even be exaggerated, but in general the Gothic darkness draws us into the vaults rather than oppressing with its darkness.

The style may be dated and the original idea may be a bit over the top. But these stories remain beautifully written and still captivate.