Now you are at the place of annihilation
Sep. 20th, 2021 05:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileI first read Angela Carter’s classic short story collection The Bloody Chamber my freshman year in college, and I have been intending to reread it… well, pretty much ever since then, but especially since I went to see Kelly Link give a talk about it at Harvard Book Store to celebrate the release of the 75th anniversary edition (more properly the 75th birthday edition; the book was first published in 1979; it was Carter herself who would have been turning 75). The 75th anniversary/birthday edition is also very pretty, much nicer than the battered 1990 edition I had in college. It has nevertheless been sitting untouched on my shelf for a while until Gillian and I decided that we should have a special Halloween edition of the BSpec book club, where we would read The Bloody Chamber and follow it up with a viewing of The Company of Wolves.
Though the book is short I tried to read it slowly, or at least as slowly as I can ever read things, taking at least a short break between each story to enjoy its particular flavor before jumping into the next one. This was occasionally challenging as some of the stories are only two or three pages long; I was also sometimes reading them while other people in the room were watching Premier League soccer highlights at top volume. Nevertheless, it was an experience, and I think I did get more out of it reading it a second time--and as an older, hopefully somewhat wiser person--than I did at 18.
Though the tones of each story vary, overall the collection has a very strong lush Gothic vibe; certain words crop up multiple times--amniotic, tintinnabulation, corruption--that make the whole thing earthy in a way that I feel like a lot of other authors shoot for and wind up at sticky instead. Some bits of it are funny; most of it is creepy. My personal favorites are the modern (for the time) retelling of Bluebeard, the titular story, which as far as I am concerned is about how rich people are sociopaths, and the classic vampire story The Lady of the House of Love, which is just the kind of slow-moving, falling-down, purplish-ly written story that you feel you ought to read aloud to somebody else at Halloween.
Overall, excellent reading for spooky season or any season at all.
Though the book is short I tried to read it slowly, or at least as slowly as I can ever read things, taking at least a short break between each story to enjoy its particular flavor before jumping into the next one. This was occasionally challenging as some of the stories are only two or three pages long; I was also sometimes reading them while other people in the room were watching Premier League soccer highlights at top volume. Nevertheless, it was an experience, and I think I did get more out of it reading it a second time--and as an older, hopefully somewhat wiser person--than I did at 18.
Though the tones of each story vary, overall the collection has a very strong lush Gothic vibe; certain words crop up multiple times--amniotic, tintinnabulation, corruption--that make the whole thing earthy in a way that I feel like a lot of other authors shoot for and wind up at sticky instead. Some bits of it are funny; most of it is creepy. My personal favorites are the modern (for the time) retelling of Bluebeard, the titular story, which as far as I am concerned is about how rich people are sociopaths, and the classic vampire story The Lady of the House of Love, which is just the kind of slow-moving, falling-down, purplish-ly written story that you feel you ought to read aloud to somebody else at Halloween.
Overall, excellent reading for spooky season or any season at all.