Saints and Strangers (King Penguin)

Originally published as "Black Venus" in the UK in 19851. The Fall River Axe Murders2. The Kiss3. Our Lady of the Massacre4. Peter and the Wolf5. The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe6. Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream7. The Kitchen Child9. Black VenusThese stories are also included in "Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories" by Angela Carter

How can I have missed Angela Carter up to now? Judging by these eight stories, she is a master of the imagination, painting her inventions in highly-colored language that runs the gamut of the verbal palette but is never merely garish. "An old woman sells arum lilies. This morning, she came from the mountains, where wild tulips have put out flowers like blown bubbles of blood, and the wheedling turtle-doves are nesting among the rocks." How wonderful the word "wheedling" in that quotation, or "mutilated" in this one, in which she out-grims Grimm: "They wrapped the dead in a quilt and took it home with them. Now it was late. The howling of the wolves mutilated the approaching silence of the night." She is a fantasy writer who nonetheless maintains contact with at least the distant shores of reality, an admirer of Gothic who never sinks to mere genre.Many of the stories in this collection strike sparks from the flint of other writers. This comes from an account of the childhood of Edgar Allan Poe: "And, as he continued, fascinated, appalled, to stare in the reflective glass at those features that were his own and yet not his own, the bony casket of his skull began to agitate itself as if he had succumbed to a tremendous attack of the shakes." Here she revisits A Midsummer Night's Dream from the perspective of the Indian Boy whom Oberon claimed from Tytania: "Child of the sun am I, and of the breezes, juicy as mangoes, that mythopoeically caress the Coast of Coromandel far away on the porphyry and lapis lazuli Indian shore where everything is bright and precise as lacquer." And here in the last story, "Black Venus," about Baudelaire's mistress, she speaks almost in the poet's own voice: "Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late Autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart. The sun departs the sky in winding sheets of gaudy cloud; anguish enters the city, a sense of the bitterest regret, a nostalgia for things we never knew, anguish of the turn of the year, the time of impotent yearning, the inconsolable season." Truly, she is a poet herself.Whether she is writing about Lizzie Borden's axe murders, the wife of Tamburlaine the Great, or a Lancashire lass escaped from a penal colony in Virginia to live among the Indians, Angela Carter plunges her readers into the unique atmosphere of the story and never lets us go. She loves melodrama, but uses it only as an adjunct; her real sympathies lie with the people who are driven to extremes, sometimes with macabre results, but equally often with miracles. These stories are so perfectly suited to their scale, that I can hardly imagine a full-length Carter novel -- though she has written many, and presumably found the ideal scale for them also.

I saw a good review and got this book. I didn't like it at all.

American history does not need to be mundane. Fanatics of the past will drool over this collection of historical tales, told from non-traditional perspectives. Each of these short pieces of fiction retells classic stories in a intoxicatingly funny, yet authentic way. Carter is audacious in her plain yet twisted manner of story-telling. She contorts the stories of Lizzy Borden and Edgar Allen Poe in such a way that the reader will find herself somewhat befuddled. This is not to say that "Saints and Strangers" is not a well crafted collection of short stories. This book is indicative of Carter's mastery of putting a feminist spin on traditional folk tales.

I love this book! This is my first book by Angela Carter and I am not at all dissapointed! I can't wait to get another by her. Her style is very different than what I am use to. I just couldn't put the book down and I am anticipating my next Angela Carter book!