Book reviews
The Bloody Chamber: a fairy tale should know who is holding the key
Angela Carter’s collection rewrites familiar tales with lush, sharp prose and keeps asking who benefits when a story calls control romance.
Whimsical Woes editorial ·
The old story says the locked room is frightening. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber asks a more useful question: who owns the keys, and who has been trained to call that arrangement beautiful? The collection reworks familiar fairy tales and legends—Bluebeard, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast—through Gothic excess, sensuality, and a wit that does not let inherited stories keep their good manners.
Familiar plots arrive wearing new clothes
The publisher describes the collection as dark, sensual versions of well-known tales. That is accurate, but “retelling” can sound gentler than Carter’s method. These stories do not simply swap names or modernize a moral. Their ornate language makes the old bargains visible: a bride is praised for innocence, a predator is dressed in velvet, and a dangerous room becomes both a spectacle and a warning.
The title story’s Bluebeard framework is especially good at letting attraction and dread share the same sentence. A luxurious object can be lovely to look at and still be part of a trap. Carter’s prose lingers over surfaces—color, fabric, food, rooms—then makes the reader reconsider what those surfaces are helping to conceal. It is an art-minded horror collection in the best sense: decoration is never just decoration.
Desire is a plot engine, not a moral stain
Carter gives sexual desire room to be complicated. It can be curious, pleasurable, frightening, transactional, or tangled up with danger. That choice interrupts a familiar fairy-tale habit where a woman’s wanting is treated as the mistake that causes everything else. Here, the question is not merely whether a heroine obeys a rule. It is whether the rule was designed to protect her or to keep somebody else comfortable.
The collection’s style is part of its argument. Readers who love baroque prose, theatrical scenes, and images with a little too much lipstick will have a feast. Readers who prefer spare language may feel the sentences are wearing a whole jewelry box at once. The lushness can be deliberately excessive; it can also make individual stories blur together if you read too many in one sitting.
Where the retelling still has limits
A sharp rewrite does not erase the histories of the source tales, and dark sensuality is not automatically liberating. Some readers will find Carter’s treatment of sex and violence exhilarating; others will find parts of it uncomfortable or overdetermined. Both reactions can belong in the conversation. “Feminist retelling” is not a magic stamp that exempts a story from criticism.
Penguin’s description notes that the collection reworks several familiar legends and that “The Company of Wolves” later formed the basis for Neil Jordan’s film. Read the stories for how they make agency visible inside the machinery of fairy-tale danger. If you want a shorter, colder film counterpart to the question of desire and transformation, our [The White Reindeer review](/journal/white-reindeer-1952-pirita-winter-review) follows a woman whose change is both power and threat.
Questions from the crypt
What kind of book is The Bloody Chamber?
It is a collection of Gothic, fantastical short stories by Angela Carter that rework familiar fairy tales and legends.
Which fairy tales does Angela Carter retell?
The collection includes dark versions of stories associated with Bluebeard, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, and Beauty and the Beast, among others.
Is The Bloody Chamber suitable for readers who want subtle prose?
Maybe not. Carter’s language is richly descriptive and theatrical; readers who prefer very spare prose may find its deliberate excess challenging.