The Bloody Chamber

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

A 1979 Short Story anthology by Angela Carter based around the gothic retelling of old fairy tales.


Tropes used in The Bloody Chamber include:
  • All Girls Want Bad Boys: Genre Savvy Puss-in-Boots is well-aware of this trope and suggests that the best way to woo an unattainable woman is to "convince her her orifice will be your salvation, and she's yours!"
  • All Men Are Perverts: A common theme in Carter's stories, but taken to an extreme in "The Snow Child". There is a very unpleasant scene in which a dead adolescent girl is violently raped by a sobbing man, just because he can. It is awful.
  • A Man Is Not a Virgin: Averted in "The Lady In The House Of Love" - the hero's virginity is mentioned several times, and hinted to give him Virgin Power.
  • Big Damn Heroes: The heroine's mother in "The Bloody Chamber". Also serves as a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
  • Disappeared Dad: In "The Bloody Chamber".
  • Grimmification
  • Humanoid Abomination: The Erl-King could be argued to be this. Appearing as a peculiar green tree-like man that represents the feral side of humanity, he has a tendency to kidnap young girls, rape them and transform them into songbirds, as well as being able to control the forest and its inhabitants. He is also not a nice guy.
  • Lighter and Softer: If this trope can apply within a work, then "Puss-in-Boots" fits, being a Restoration sex comedy amidst mostly Gothic horror. "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon" is also not a horror story.
  • Mama Bear: The heroine's mother in "The Bloody Chamber".
  • Missing Mom: "The Courtship of Mr Lyon" and "The Tiger's Bride".
  • Our Vampires Are Different: In "The Lady in the House of Love".
  • Our Werewolves Are Different: Werewolves figure in several stories.
  • Parental Abandonment: Crops up a lot in the form of Missing Mom and Disappeared Dad.
  • Retired Badass: The heroine's mother in "The Bloody Chamber". She had already dealt with pirates, nursed back to health a plague ravaged village, and singelhandedly shot and killed a maneating tiger, all before she was even 18. She comes out of retirement at the very end of the story.