Morena’s Reviews > The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories > Status Update

When Carters heroine goes from girl boss to a primate:
“She will lay his fearful head on her lap and she will pick out the lice from his pelt and perhaps she will put the lice into her mouth and eat them, as he will bid her, as she would do in a savage marriage ceremony.”

Her huge dark eyes almost broke his heart with their waiflike, lost look; yet he was disturbed, almost repelled, by her extraordinarily fleshy mouth, a mouth with wide, full, prominent lips of a vibrant purplish-crimson, a morbid mouth.

Too many roses bloomed on enormous thickets that lined the path, thickets bristling with thorns, and the flowers themselves were almost too luxuriant, their huge congregations of plush petals somehow obscene in their excess, their whorled, tightly budded cores outrageous in their implications

Now the stark elders have an anorexic look; there is not much in the autumn wood to make you smile but it is not yet, not quite yet, the saddest time of the year. Only, there is a haunting sense of the imminent cessation of being; the year, in turning, turns in on itself. Introspective weather, a sickroom hush.

I loved the descriptions of bluebeard etc, but as a retelling the first story didn't work for me. I know the original stories can be a bit nonsensical and so is this retelling especially with added feminism which some decry is absent. Well it's here in the form of the victimhood, the brave mother saving the day, and it's here in the form of the nosy, horny, busybody, heroine with zero willpower.