The Bloody Chamber - The first and titular story of the collection was quite disturbing, but beautiful all the same. All of Angela Carter's writing is beautiful and I really felt like I just understood this one. It's a retelling of Bluebeard which I didn't actually know the plot of and wouldn't have recognized without looking it up. So, I don't know how it compares to the original story but this was definitely the best of the collection and I think it was the longest as well.

The Courtship of Mr Lyon - This was the first of two Beauty and the Beast stories. I liked this one slightly better although I thought that the ending was a little rushed maybe. In this Beauty and the Beast story, Beauty's father steals a rose and so the Beast tells him to bring Beauty to have dinner with him at his house and she does and stays there out of obligation while the Beast helps her father regain his wealth. Eventually she leaves and promises to come back but gets distracted by her new wealth and almost returns too late. I tend to like Beauty and the Beast and once again Carter's writing was beautiful.

The Tiger's Bride - In this Beauty and the Beast story, Beauty's father looses her to the Beast at cards and the Beast just wants to see Beauty naked... eventually she does reveal herself to him and stays with him and is a beast as well? I found this one kind of confusing and didn't like any of the characters. It was definitely more unique than the first but I just didn't like it as much. There was also some abrasive licking that made my skin itch,

Puss-in-Boots - Similarly to Bluebeard, I don't think I'd ever read a Puss-in-Boots story before... This one was fine. Puss helps his Master get with a pretty lady in a tower even though she's married. I do appreciate hearing from a cat's perspective I guess.

The Erl-King - This was probably my second favorite story after The Bloody Chamber. I had never heard of the story this is based off before, but I really enjoyed it, especially the ending. In a weird way it kind of reminded me of Hansel and Gretel but just with Gretel and the Witch who in this case would be the Erl-King. (He's not a witch... more of a forest spirit/fairy/monster).

The Snow Child - This one was only two pages long but it still somehow managed to be the worst in the collection. There was necrophilia/pedophilia involved and I simply could have gone without. I mean obviously the two main characters the Count and his wife were meant to be awful so I can maybe understand what it was going for but the disgusting bits ruined this story for me and there wasn't enough of anything else to really redeem it for me.

The Lady in the House of Love - A vampire lady lives alone with her nurse until a young man comes and I guess she turns human and dies. This one was okay I guess, but it was when reading this one that I noticed just how often virginity is mentioned. Why does every story have to mention that somebody is a virgin over and over again... It's such a tiresome trope. Sometimes I think it's definitely okay and can make sense, but in almost every story.... Idk. This one had some interesting bits about how the young man is also fighting in a war that he comes from and then returns to after the events of the story but I don't really know what to make of that..

The Werewolf - This was a Little Red Riding Hood retelling. I do like Little Red Riding Hood stories but in this one and the next there was a lot of chopping off the limbs of wolves and that just makes me kind of sad. Red Riding Hood is a badass here and chops off the wolf's paw only to find that it was her grandma who was a werewolf. I kind of liked the Salem Witch Trial vibes of this one. It was okay I guess but it mostly just made me sad.

The Company of Wolves - This was another sort of Red Riding Hood story, but also not. I appreciate the details about how if you burn a werewolf's clothing they will remain a werewolf forever. That is one of my favorite pieces of werewolf lore and I think it is sorely underutilized. It reminds me of the Lais of Marie de France's werewolves which I like a lot. However, even though I read this just last night maybe 10 hours ago I already forgot most of it. I think a woman marries a man who disappears (because he is a werewolf) so she gets remarried and has kids but then the first husband finally returns and gets mad. Something like that...

Wolf-Alice - This one was possibly the weirdest in the collection and the most difficult to follow. I thought it was a weak end to the collection. A girl is raised as a wolf even though she's human and she works for a duke and grows up and... I honestly don't really know what happened. Maybe I could reread it but I was also pretty drained at this point. Regardless, I think this was one of the weaker stories of the collection and could have been cut (along with The Snow Child). ( )

Lurid and grown-up retellings of folktale tropes, with feminist updates, by an author I'd never heard of until Backlisted. ( )

Postmodern, feminist, and psychosexual retellings of fairy tales. It was a disappointing read, but through no fault of its own. At the time it must have been groundbreaking, today it's like that one kid in high school that's shocked, shocked, to discover that there are sex puns in Shakespeare.
I've just seen this too many times to be impressed by the overwrought prose and the psychological archetypes. I've seen that the wolf character from Into the Woods is traditionally played by the same actor as the prince character. I sat through Red Riding Hood that one time. But to be fair these are imitators of the original. It's not Angela Carter's fault that we've had three decades of ironic fairy tale adaptations to water down her message.
I imagine that Anne Rice is in a similar predicament. She did sexy vampires before they were cool, but still Lestat is less famous then Edward Cullen. ( )

Just read the first story (The Bloody Chamber) itself but wow it's really powerful and scary and sinister with an incredible atmosphere of oppression and withheld violence and a lot of suspense even though it's likely you know what's going to happen from the start. What stood out to me was a bit in the middle which breaks open the suppressed violence when she opens the book of art showing sadistic, violent, murderous paintings - the description is suddenly very explicit. I feel deeply creeped out after reading it, it's really good

None of the others blew me away quite like the first one did (although to be fair it's the longest story in the collection) but I definitely enjoyed them a lot. They're either retellings of or strongly influenced by fairy tales - for most of them it's obvious what it's based on very quickly but it's either told very well bringing out undercurrents and ideas in the original stories you wouldn't have thought about before or with a different take on it. The only odd one is "The Courtship of Mr Lyon" which seems like a really straight version of Beauty and the Beast but I'm probably missing some stuff with that. The themes of misogyny, objectification of women, virginity, etc crop up a lot. The stories generally have a sinister/gothic/surreal vibe except for Puss in Boots which is humorous and bawdy. Her descriptions are really good at evoking an atmosphere although she uses a lot of really obscure words and I was glad to be reading on an ereader so I could look stuff up easily heh. Sorry for kind of shallow review but I liked it ( )

I liked about half of the stories in the book, the ones that read more like Gothic horror. However, even in the stories I preferred they seemed to get bogged down with a tangle of language especially in the Erl-King. Considering the book's only about 150 pages long it took me quite a while to get through it though I'm glad I read it as some of the later stories in the book definitely had a grim-fairy-tale-dream type of atmosphere (particularly The Lady of the House of Love and the Company of Wolves). I can't say I'd recommend it to anyone but I would say it IS worth reading. ( )