I loved the art and the feel of the cover and the font in this book. One note on the edition I read: it’s from Penguin, a special Penguin Ink edition, and it’s marvelously beautiful, in the style of the Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions, though it’s not a classic…yet. It also the most deeply and chillingly dark, to the core. I love dark fairy tales, and of the various collections I’ve read ( My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, The Rose and the Beast, Lies Knives and Girls in Red Dresses, etc), The Bloody Chamber is by far the best of these books. The “Beauty” character is gambled away by her father to a mysterious masked lord. “The Tiger’s Bride”, though similar in title to one of my favorite books, The Tiger’s Wife, is not at all like the latter book. “The Bloody Chamber” is descriptive and horrifying, “Puss-In-Boots” is narrated by the rascally cat himself, and both Beauty and the Beast stories are quite different too. Angela Carter has a really distinctive writing style it’s sensual and descriptive, dense but somehow not overwritten. These stories are populated by beasts, and vampires, and werewolves, and witches, dark and gripping, and dark and grim. My favorites are the first five or so they’re more entertaining and less completely dark (except for “The Bloody Chamber”, of course). “The Bloody Chamber” is a retelling of Bluebeard, and this book also includes “The Courtship of Mr Lyon”, a Beauty and the Beast retelling, “The Tiger’s Bride”, also a Beauty and the Beast retelling, “Puss-In-Boots”, “The Erl-King”, “The Snow Child”, “The Lady of the House of Love” which is a vampire story, “The Werewolf”, “The Company of Wolves”, and “Wolf-Alice”. Some, like the title story, are disturbingly bloody, others, like “Puss-In-Boots” are bawdily funny. I loved some of them more than others, but the majority of the stories are really good.

The Bloody Chamber is a deliciously dark little volume of fairy tales by the famed Angela Carter. From “The Bloody Chamber”: I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother’s apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage.

The bloody chamber cover