Rating: 
Summary: Tales as rich as blood red roses
Review: "The Bloody Chamber" is a work of literature which transcends genre and unearths the thinly veiled erotic elements of the fairy tale form. Each of the ten stories in this collection are as rich and sensuous as red velvet, it is quite possible to open the book at any page and find yourself immersed in the beauty of the prose. Highlights include the eponymous novella "The Bloody Chamber" (Carter's subversive re-telling of the "Bluebeard" story) and "The Lady of the House of Love", which illuminates the notion of a decaying European aristocracy behind the myth of the vampire.Carter presents us with two contrasting (yet not conflicting) versions of the "Beauty and the Beast" story with "The Courtship of Mr Lyon" and "The Tiger's Bride". In the former, the fierce nature of the beast is curbed by the gentleness of the female protagonist, whilst in the latter, the heroine discovers the liberating power of the repressed animal aspect of her sexuality. Each story has a feminist flavour, exploring both male and female sexual desire, and the darker domains of eroticism. A book which will increasingly be hailed as a masterpiece in years to come.
Rating:
Summary: Tales as rich as blood red roses
Review: "The Bloody Chamber" is a work of literature which transcends genre and unearths the thinly veiled erotic elements of the fairy tale form. Each of the ten stories in this collection are as rich and sensuous as red velvet, it is quite possible to open the book at any page and find yourself immersed in the beauty of the prose. Highlights include the eponymous novella "The Bloody Chamber" (Carter's subversive re-telling of the "Bluebeard" story) and "The Lady of the House of Love", which illuminates the notion of a decaying European aristocracy behind the myth of the vampire. Carter presents us with two contrasting (yet not conflicting) versions of the "Beauty and the Beast" story with "The Courtship of Mr Lyon" and "The Tiger's Bride". In the former, the fierce nature of the beast is curbed by the gentleness of the female protagonist, whilst in the latter, the heroine discovers the liberating power of the repressed animal aspect of her sexuality. Each story has a feminist flavour, exploring both male and female sexual desire, and the darker domains of eroticism. A book which will increasingly be hailed as a masterpiece in years to come.
Rating:
Summary: bloody chamber is blood-curdling entertainment
Review: Although I have read only the first story, the bloody chamber, I have to say it is a fantastic read with lots of suspense and heart-pounding horror. The story is well-written and builds to an exciting climax. The Bloody Chamber is a prime example of how a short story ought to be written.
Rating: 
Summary: Unique
Review: Before it was trendy to adapt fairy tale themes into adult fiction, there was Angela Carter. In _The Bloody Chamber_, Carter works with a variety of fairy tale and folkloric themes, crafting them into very adult stories written in a style all her own. Somehow, her prose manages to be hauntingly strange and deliciously earthy at once. I didn't like all of the stories in this collection, but I very much liked some of them, and I'm glad I read the book. I especially enjoyed the title story (a retelling of "Bluebeard"), and "The Lady of the House of Love", quite possibly my favorite vampire tale ever. In it, the tragic lady Nosferatu reads her Tarot cards every night, and every night draws cards signifying death--until one night she draws Les Amoureux, the Lovers, and everything changes. Splendid. There is more here--a raunchy "Puss in Boots", two takes on "Beauty and the Beast", several stories dealing with werewolves and/or Red Riding Hood, and much more.
Rating:
Summary: Unique
Review: Before it was trendy to adapt fairy tale themes into adult fiction, there was Angela Carter. In _The Bloody Chamber_, Carter works with a variety of fairy tale and folkloric themes, crafting them into very adult stories written in a style all her own. Somehow, her prose manages to be hauntingly strange and deliciously earthy at once. I didn't like all of the stories in this collection, but I very much liked some of them, and I'm glad I read the book. I especially enjoyed the title story (a retelling of "Bluebeard"), and "The Lady of the House of Love", quite possibly my favorite vampire tale ever. In it, the tragic lady Nosferatu reads her Tarot cards every night, and every night draws cards signifying death--until one night she draws Les Amoureux, the Lovers, and everything changes. Splendid. There is more here--a raunchy "Puss in Boots", two takes on "Beauty and the Beast", several stories dealing with werewolves and/or Red Riding Hood, and much more.
Rating:
Summary: fascinating rewriting of fariy tales
Review: Carter manages to rewrite some well known fairy tales out of an emancipatory point ot view: not only men but also women should be allowed to enjoy a good sexlife. She undermines not only the patriarchal society but also several conventionally accepted binary opposites as human- animal, fact-fiction,... Her stories explore the marginal, the twilight.
Rating: 
Summary: Shiny new dresses
Review: Carter's collection of reworked faerie and folk tales is quite amazing. She succintly carves out the heart of the story and places it in a new form. And her use of potent sensuality (like in the wonderful "Puss in Boots") is marvelous. I wanted to like the book more, but all the stories aren't as captivating, so. The book is remarkable for its intelligence and sparkling originality.
Rating:
Summary: Quirky, disarming, witty, sexy -- magic realism at its best!
Review: Do you have the courage to enter Angela Carter's quirky realm of magical realism? She is brilliant. BRILLIANT! I love these short stories -- or rather, fairy tales that everyone is familiar with. The stories have very familiar themes, like tragic love stories, werewolf stories and Cinderella-like stories. Of course, Angela added her own ingredients in the stories. There are a lot of elements of sex and a large dosage of magical realism. They are so mind-boggling disturbing that I found myself thinking about them long after I finished reading them. My favorites are "The Lady of the House of Love," "The Snow Child," and "The Werewolf." I marvel at Carter's imagination. She is truly gifted. Her writing style sort of reminds me of Amanda Filipacchi -- a brilliant French novelist. In fact, I wonder if Carter influenced Filipacchi's work. I highly recommend The Bloody Chamber. This isn't for the faint at heart; this is dark literature at its finest!
Rating:
Summary: Delicious, witty, shivery, unseelie...a dark delight.
Review: I discovered Angela Carter via the fantasy/horror film "The Company of Wolves," for which she wrote the screenplay, adapted from one of the short stories in "The Bloody Chamber." Since then I've read two of her novels and two books of short stories, and this one remains the best by far. All the stories are good, but the title one particularly so; it even inspired me to buy a bottle of cointreau, the liqueur the heroine sipped after her dinner with Bluebeard. The taste is exotic, tropical, sweet-sour-bitter, with a strangely insinuating warmth; not unlike the prose itself. The vampire story is a perfect analogy of beautiful, rotting, slightly ridiculous old-world European romanticism coming to its denouement in the bleak light of modernism, appropriately timed to World War I, appropriately personified in an innocent (but just as doomed, and what does that tell us?) blond soldier. And the story "The Erl-King" put me in mind, somehow, of a disillusioned Lady Chatterley creeping one last time to the hut of a mossy, malevolent Mellors, in a voluptuously violent autumnal reversal of the spring marriage of John Thomas and Lady Jane. In short, it's a mouthwatering book -- so evocative, so subtly disturbing, such texture and richness...and all the more memorable for the occasional touches of dark, edgy, cynical wit. Anne Rice is to cheap triple sec as Angela Carter is to cointreau. I'd kiss the late Ms. Carter's decaying feet if I could, and perhaps she'd appreciate that.
Rating:
Summary: Sense and Sensuality
Review: I first came about this collection of stories through the inclusion of two of it's works in the Neil Jordan film, the Company of Wolves. From this, I was immediately impressed and intrigued by Carter's style of writing. In "the Company of Wolves", we saw the ingenious juxtaposition between the varying mythologies of the fairy story, with the natural-sexual awakening of the adolescent. This is the defining factor of these works. Though the stories move from place to place to explore further myths and legends, it is this one consistent thread that anchors the stories together to create a unified work. The writer creates reoccurring motifs of love, lust and sexuality that give the stories a further narrative cohesion, despite being generally fragmented in terms of characters and scope.
The unity of the book, and the sustaining of the literary atmosphere, is also created through the varied textual forms that Carter chooses to chronicle. So, for her examinations here the writer hand-picks legends that have the strongest roots in sensuality... so we have vampirism, werewolves, feral children and jungle beasts beguiling and defiling a succession of young women in a series of deeply emotional narrative episodes. To go into any great detail about these stories would be a great injustice to readers who are yet to experience Carter's poetic use of language and deft storytelling capabilities. Needless to say, the stories featured drip with a dense, erotic atmosphere that is occasionally overwhelming... though there is also a strong underlining of horror, tension and mystery; with the reader free to read between the lines and decode the various clues that Carter layers within her work.
The author's real genius though, is her ability to depict the more mundane aspects of life and enrich them beyond the realms of everyday literature into a kind of Technicolor majesty through the use of poetic prose, self-referentialism, biblical quotations and more than a hint of metaphorical imagery. She also writes her stories in a beautiful stream of conscious style that is filled with richly constructed details, which brings to life every action in a completely vivid way to further develop the evocative world that is created especially for us. It's an audacious device, but one that works exceptionally well with this kind of material... so because of this, the continual atmosphere of gothic gloom also helps to lull the reader into an almost hypnotic state in which Carter's words can re-develop, in order to take on newer, more subjective meanings.
This book takes us on a beautiful, shocking and often frightening journey into realms of innocence and sensuality that few literary works can equate. Carter's talent as a storyteller and as a poet are greatly under-appreciated by the so-called people in the know (how else can you explain her lack of inclusion in the UK's Big Read Top 100?), and, when viewed in the context of this book, becomes something of a sad reminder of what a great talent we've lost. Thankfully, this book should succeed in opening your eyes to her genius, since it brilliantly demonstrates her various creative skills mirrored within each of these separate stories.
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