The bloody chamber and other stories

Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, also published as The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, was issued in Britain by Gollancz in 1979 and took the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize.

Every story in the book is founded on a fairy tale or a folk tale. Ten of them make up the collection, and the title piece is a reworking of Bluebeard; the rest include The Snow Child, The Werewolf, Puss-in-Boots, The Erl-King, The Tiger's Bride, The Courtship of Mr Lyon, The Company of Wolves, The Lady of the House of Love and Wolf-Alice.

The title piece is much longer than the others: a novelette of at least double the next longest and about thirty times the briefest, a sketch called The Snow Child. Carter disliked the description of the book as a set of adult fairy tales, saying that she had wanted to expose the hidden content of the old stories rather than produce fresh versions of them, and the collection has since been reprinted with other work in Burning Your Boats.