Recommendations
Books Like The Bloody Chamber
Best books to read after The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
The Bloody Chamber exposed and transformed the sexual politics of the fairy tale from within. These 8 books share its feminist approach to the Gothic mode, its use of dark fantasy to say true things about female experience, and its conviction that genre is a language capable of carrying the most serious arguments.
- 1Buy
Her Body and Other Parties
by Carmen Maria Machado
Machado's 2017 debut story collection is the most direct contemporary heir to Carter's project — 'The Husband Stitch' is explicitly in dialogue with the green ribbon campfire story and with Carter's mode of feminist Gothic retelling, and the whole collection applies Carter's method to the full range of women's embodied experience.
- 2Buy
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
by Shirley Jackson
Jackson's 1962 Gothic novel about two sisters in an isolated mansion after the murder of their family is the foundational American text of female Gothic fiction and the most important American predecessor to Carter's feminist Gothic — both writers use the Gothic mode to explore female power and the violence done to women who refuse to be contained.
- 3Buy
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's 1987 novel — in which a formerly enslaved woman is haunted by the ghost of her murdered daughter — uses the Gothic mode as Carter does: to make visible forms of violence and horror that realism cannot accommodate, and to insist that the historical and the supernatural are different angles on the same reality.
- 4Buy
The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
Atwood's 1985 dystopian novel — in which Gilead, a totalitarian theocracy, has reduced fertile women to the status of reproductive vessels — uses the same analytical intelligence that Carter applies to fairy tales to examine the political logic of patriarchal control; both writers treat oppressive gender systems as systems that can be taken apart and understood.
- 5Buy
Nights at the Circus
by Angela Carter
Carter's 1984 novel about Fevvers, a winged trapeze artist touring late-Victorian Europe with Colonel Kearney's circus, extends the project of The Bloody Chamber into a full-length picaresque — the same fabulous female power, the same scrutiny of the systems that contain and display women's bodies, the same mixture of magic and political analysis.
- 6Buy
The Tiger's Wife
by Téa Obreht
Obreht's 2011 debut novel — set in a Balkan country in the aftermath of war, interweaving a contemporary story with two wartime tales about a woman who befriends a tiger and a deathless man — inherits Carter's method of using myth and folk tale as a way of approaching historical violence that direct narration cannot capture.
- 7Buy
The Snow Child
by Eowyn Ivey
Ivey's 2012 debut novel set in 1920s Alaska — in which a childless couple builds a snow child that comes to life — inhabits the fairy tale form as Carter does, taking its logic seriously and using it to explore the deeper desires and fears that the tale encodes, in this case the longing for a child and the impossibility of holding the wild world still.
- 8Buy
Circe
by Madeline Miller
Miller's 2018 novel reimagines the witch of the Odyssey as a fully realized protagonist rather than an obstacle to Odysseus — the foundational move of feminist myth retelling that Carter made in fairy tale and that Miller makes in classical mythology; readers who love what Carter does to Bluebeard will love what Miller does to Circe.
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