The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
Published in 1979, The Bloody Chamber is Angela Carter's electrifying collection of ten stories that strip fairy tales back to their bloody, erotic roots and rebuild them. The title piece reimagines Bluebeard as a tale of a young pianist married to a wealthy marquis with a secret room. Other stories revisit Beauty and the Beast, Puss in Boots, Snow White, and Little Red Riding Hood, sometimes returning to their oldest folkloric versions and sometimes pushing them into the gothic, the surreal, and the openly sexual. Carter's prose is dense, ornate, and unmistakable, drawing on the Marquis de Sade, the symbolist poets, and her own feminist convictions about female desire and danger. The collection has been credited with helping to launch the modern fairy tale revival and remains a touchstone for writers from Helen Oyeyemi to Carmen Maria Machado.
What you might want to know about The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Angela Carter's lush feminist retellings of fairy tales, from Bluebeard to Beauty and the Beast and Little Red Riding Hood.
It is a collection of ten short stories, most of them retellings of classic European fairy tales.
No. Despite the fairy tale source material, the stories are explicitly written for adults.
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories was written by Angela Carter, published in 1978 by Penguin Books.
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is 128 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories takes most readers 2 to 3 hours to finish.
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.