The Bloody Chamber

By: Angela Carter

Narrated by: Richard Armitage, Emilia Fox

Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

A collection of short stories, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories was first published in 1979 and awarded the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize.

This Audible exclusive adaptation is narrated by legendary actors, Richard Armitage and Emilia Fox, who take on different chapters of the audiobook. Among these are 'The Bloody Chamber', 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon', 'The Tiger's Bride', 'Puss in Boots', 'The Erl-King', 'The Snow Child', 'The Lady of the House of Love', 'The Werewolf', 'The Company of Wolves' and 'Wolf-Alice'.

About the book

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is a titillating series of dark, sensual and fantastical stories, inspired by well-known fairy tales and folklore.

Dissatisfied with the unrealistic portrayal of women in these legendary fables, Carter turns them on their head, introducing subversively dark, sensual and gothic narratives.

Breathing new and unexpected life into favourite childhood characters such as Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard and Beauty and the Beast, Carter shocks, seduces and amuses the listener with her unique, iconic and surrealist reimagining.

About the author

Angela Carter was born in 1940, in Sussex. She grew up in the shabbily respectable south London district of Balham, the second child of an eccentric journalist father and a neurotic housewife mother.

She studied English at Bristol University before travelling, teaching and writing numerous best-selling novels. They have all received critical acclaim and remain firm favourites of modern English literature.

Angela was a feminist throughout her life, wrote for Spare Rib magazine and voted Labour. Her novels are wholly reflective of her world views and continue to inspire new generations of men and women worldwide.

About the narrator

Best known for his roles in The Hobbit, Hannibal, Captain America, Robin Hood, Spooks and North and South, Richard Armitage has established himself as one of the greatest British actors of our time.

With 14 audiobooks under his belt, including David Hewson's Romeo and Juliet: A Novel and Georgette Heyer's Venetia, Richard's story telling abilities have not gone unnoticed. In 2014, he was merited with having narrated the Audiobook of the Year, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: A Novel.

Emilia Fox is an English actress who has starred as Dr Nikki Alexander on BBC Crime drama, Silent Witness, since 2004. Her other TV and film credits include Merlin, Pride and Prejudice, The Pianist, The Casual Vacancy and Inside No. 9.

Also no stranger to audiobook productions, Emilia delivers a myriad of powerhouse performances such as in Philippa Gregory's The White Queen, Muriel Spark's The Complete Short Stories, and Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey.

©1979 Angela Carter (P)2018 Audible, Ltd

Not for everyone: Gothic, surreal, prose w/70’s feminism

I have a very difficult time sympathizing (never mind agreeing with) the low score reviews for this. I get that it’s not for everyone, but expecting a book of sanitized fairytales or zombie fighting heros from that title and this particular author?? That’s ignorance of some kind.

I will preface this opinion with the fact that I specifically sought out this book of short stories, or more accurately this group of intertextual collages of folktales.
I wanted and expected to be enthralled, uncomfortable, and left thinking with unresolved feelings.
Some short stories I enjoyed more than others. That said, I thoroughly loved this book! I will likely listen to this again. Both voice actors/narrators were so good at drawing me right into the worlds of each tale! Excellent-no notes.

Now, If you do not like Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, Woman in Black, the movie Crimson Peak, lengthy prose, etc you will most likely not enjoy this book.

Also, if you don’t know anything about a book and don’t wish to be potentially blindsided do a quick Google search.

This is Gothic not Horror in the modern sense. An important distinction to know before you read it. Gothic as a genre disorients the reader with the past coming to the present, describing the environment as a foreboding character itself, unfolding romances that blur fear with love, positing characters who are largely metaphors, and haunting readers/characters with some grotesque scenes. Yes this book is quite macabre, disturbing, and gore-filled. It definitely is not the fast-action, jump scare, terrorized plot train a modern reader might be expecting to board.

Besides being one of the top ten examples of Gothic storytelling, Carter’s re-imaginings of the pieces of familiar stories are intentionally disrupting the form of the Folk Tale featuring a woman as it’s main character. To be clear, these tales, like most original folktales, are bizarre, horrifying, and full of death - not neat happy endings. She heavily uses the metaphor of the female body/ sexuality during a pivotal moment of change like puberty or marriage to highlight the violence and messiness of humanity and criticize societal structures that oppress women. It’s no fourth wave, but effective given context.

If you made it through my opinion on Angela Carter’s incredible work here and why I love it- gold star! Now choose to read The Bloody Chamber and other short stories at your own discretion (But really though, Wikipedia is free)

not what I expected

it's not erotica, but it comes close. the "c" word that Americans notoriously dislike is used fairly frequently with negative, positive, and neutral connotations. I wasn't ready.
I might have to listen to it again when I'm more prepared so I can see if I enjoy the stories.

Sensual, Beautiful, Graphic Fairy Tale Horror

The Bloody Chamber (1979) by Angel Carter is a collection of ten vivid, sensual, beautiful, and brutal short stories inspired by classic fairy tale or horror motifs.

The title story (at over 40 pages the longest work in the collection) is a lush, disturbing, and suspenseful Bluebeard tale, with a feminist slant and a detailed French fin-de-siecle setting.
“I know it must seem a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me like a lily. Yes. A lily. Possessed of that strange, ominous calm of a sentient vegetable, like one of those cobra-headed, funereal lilies whose white sheaths are curled out of a flesh as thick and tensely yielding to the touch as vellum.”

Then follow two retellings of the beauty and the beast motif, the straightforward and poignant adherence to the plot in “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” set in contemporary London and the wonderful reversal of the plot in “The Tiger’s Bride” set in southern Italy.
“And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs.”

The one comedy in the collection, “Puss-in-Boots,” is a bawdy memoir told by the pragmatic, randy, egotistical, raconteur cat, who, when not washing his privates or singing for rotten vegetables and assorted footwear, takes charge of a down and out cavalry officer in Bergamo.
“I went about my ablutions, tonguing my arsehole with the impeccable hygenic integrity of cats, one leg stuck in the air like a ham bone; I chose to remain silent. Love? What has my rakish master, for whom I’ve jumped through the window of every brothel in the city, besides haunting the virginal back garden of the convent and god knows what other goatish errands, to do with the tender passion?”

“The Erl-King” is a densely poetic psychological story of the conflicting desires of the female narrator to yield her self to love a forest spirit/goblin given to keeping song birds in cages or to save her self by escaping from him in a weird ending switching from first to third person).
“He knows which of the frilled, blotched, rotted fungi are fit to eat; he understands their eldritch ways, how they spring up overnight in lightless places and thrive on dead things. Even the homely wood blewits, that you cook like tripe, with milk and onions, and the egg-yolk yellow chanterelle with its fan-vaulting and faint scent of apricots, all spring up overnight like bubbles of earth, unsustained by nature, existing in a void. And I could believe that it has been the same with him; he came alive from the desire of the woods.”

“The Snow Child” is a two-page story, an incantatory, hallucinatory alternate “Snow White,” including necrophiliac rape and a rose that bites.
“As soon as he completed her description, there she stood, beside the road, white skin, red mouth, black hair and stark naked; she was the child of his desire and the Countess hated her.”

“The Lady of the House of Love” is an absorbing and unsettling vampiric “The Lady of Shallot.”
“Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she counts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly construing a constellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into a country of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.”

Three werewolf stories close the collection: “The Werewolf” (in which Little Red Riding Hood is no innocent and the werewolf, perhaps, no werewolf), “The Company of Wolves” (in which Little Red Riding Hood is no innocent and the marriage ceremony consists of picking and eating lice), and “Wolf-Alice” (in which a girl raised by wolves is taken from them and given into the careless care of a lycanthropic Duke).
“Then her sensitive ears pricked at the sound of a step in the hall; trotting at once back to her kitchen, she encountered the Duke with the leg of a man over his shoulder. Her toenails clicked against the stairs as she padded incuriously past, she, the serene, inviolable one in her absolute and verminous innocence.”

The stories are about love and sexuality (especially female) and the pleasure, annihilation, or new life they may bring. To the extent that they are feminist tales, they depict female characters who refuse to become victims, as when Red Riding Hood, faced with the wolf who’s just eaten her grandmother, “burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat.”

Carter’s writing is lush, vivid, sensual, painterly, poetic, dense. At times it almost (but not quite) becomes too much, like overeating expensive bitter dark chocolate truffles.

As they read alternate stories in the collection, Emilia Fox and Richard Armitage are both clear, intelligent, and sensitive. My only concern might be that Armitage camps it up a fair amount doing the r rolling feline narrator of Puss-in-Boots.

Readers who like modern fairy tales, luscious writing, horror and romance, should like The Bloody Chamber.

Started well

I liked the first story but the rest were just alright. Both narrators were wonderful.

A bit uneven

A few of the stories really dragged for me, while others were very good. Puss in Boots was so much fun and so delightfully performed by Richard Armitage that I immediately hit replay and listened to it a second time.

good one

A few of the stories really dragged for me, while others were very good. so much fun and so delightfully performed by Richard Armitage that I immediately hit replay and listened to it a second time.

Very good

Well performed. Interesting stories with twists.

Sometimes left hanging and didn't really understand the ending but overall good.

Lush prose and narration

"Lush". That was my immediate thought as I was listening to these reimagined fairy tales. These are not for children; there is lots of blood and animalistic behavior, all described vividly but with subtlety ( no, that's not contradictory, as you will hear when you listen). The narration is just wonderful by both narrators. The first (4) stories are the best.

New Take On Old Tales

Puss In Boots... Brilliant interpretation by Richard Armitage. That's worth the price of admission alone.

Not Your Childhood Fairytales

Sensual, dark, macabre, and one hilarious story, these are not your fairytales from childhood. They are an usual mix and not for everyone. I can understand the mixed reviews for this collection. They were an unusual read, but the only story I thoroughly enjoyed was the hilarious Puss in Boots. That would be the only one I would listen to again. Emilia Fox and Richard Armitage gave fine performances considering the content of this book.