Do I dare call this full of symbolism, and therefore feel the need to scratch under the surface of these tales? Then again, is there any fairy tale worth it's salt that is not so.

Lets start saying that the way this is written is incredibly sensual. I was surprised because I was sure the first tale (The Bloddy Chamber), would turn up into a hardcore purple prose BDSM. It does not become explicit, but the erotic charge and the tug of war between desire for freedom and sexual or base hungers, innocence and a curiousity for corruption, is heavy and all encompassing on that one and several others in this collection (The Tiger's Bride, The Erl-king).

Puss in Boots was hilarious in all it's terribleness. Not one character in it can be called good, our narrator least of all, and yet. Lots of laughing OMG, no!

The Snow Child was... How do you pack it that fast? It takes infinitely more to unpack.

All of them are incredibly evocative. Also disturbing. Oh, and they screw with your mind with the POVs and tenses too.

I'm a still quite discombobulated by much of this, and I'm pretty certain I don't get even most  of what this is conveying, but frankly, at some point I started researching some fairy-tale stuff for background, and found out there are whole freaking books essaying on the meanings of this collection, so I reckon I'm good enough just keeping it floating on the back-burners of my mind.

"You never saw such a wild thing as my mother, her hat seized by the winds and blown out to sea so that her hair was her white mane, her black lisle legs exposed to the thigh, her skirts tucked round her waist, one hand on the reins of the rearing horse while the other clasped my father's service revolver and, behind her, the breakers of the savage, indifferent sea, like the witnesses of a furious justice."

I hadn't read this collection since my college days, and it was an absolute treat to come back to it now, without the baggage of having to write a paper or exam on it. And yet, I still found myself studying it carefully at times, because it's a work that demands to be dissected. The individual stories reference one another in surprising ways compel the reader to go back to previous tales in order to fully unearth the connection. The intricately worded sentences force us to slow down in order to fully unlock their meaning. And, of course, there are the source materials crowding around the edges of Carter's own re-imaginings.

For me, the standouts in the collection are the title piece (from which the above quote is taken), The Erl-King, and The Lady of the House of Love.

I picked this copy up recently, a beautifully printed 75th anniversary edition whose pages have a lovely thick texture and almost rough edges that give it the feel of a manuscript.

It's sort of weird that it took me so long to read Angela Carter - dark feminist leaning fairytale retellings are near and dear to my heart. This collection took me a while to get through, though that's no fault of the stories themselves. Carter's writing is rich, sumptuous, and dense enough it's worth taking your time to read. There were moments where the writing itself dazzled me as much as the storytelling. The stories do tent to run together a bit, which is why I took breaks and read this collection in between other books. All in all I liked this collection, though I'll admit I was hoping for it to be a bit darker after everything I had heard. If you're looking for solid horror this collection doesn't quite deliver, but if you're looking for something a bit on the dark side this comes through in spades.

Wonderful. Simply wonderful.

I enjoyed every story in this collection, save for one. The first four were my favorites, with the fourth--"Puss-in-Boots"--the absolute gem of the book. "The Snow Child" was the one I didn't much care for. It was a bit too disturbing for my taste.

The writing was lovely, very flowing and lyrical, and in the hands of narrators, Emilia Fox and Richard Armitage, it truly came alive for me.

I have to especially commend Richard Armitage here for his narration of "Puss-in-Boots." I laughed so hard at times I had to back up because I had missed some of the story.