by Angela Carter
foreword by Salman Rushdie
I started to write short pieces when I was living in a room too small to write a novel in.
Afterword to Fireworks
I was so impressed with Fireworks (also with myself, for finishing it), that I decided to read all of Angela Carter’s short fiction. So I acquired this collection and... nothing happened for the next few years. Last summer, I finally dug it out. It took me about nine months to read it, with breaks.
The book contains four previously published collections, including Fireworks, plus six other stories. Of collected works, The Bloody Chamber is the most conceptually and stylistically coherent one, all that Gothic horror stuff with an exception of more, um, light-hearted Puss-in-Boots. Black Venus is rather uneven. The best stories there are Our Lady of the Massacre, Peter and the Wolf and The Kitchen Child, this latter providing much-needed comic relief. It looks like Ms. Carter was fascinated with wolves: the real ones, were-ones and feral children. I like that.
American Ghosts and Old World Wonders is another mixed bag, redeemed by the tasty Text-Mex-Western Gun for the Devil and delightfully Borgesian The Merchant of Shadows (it made me reach for Internet to check if Hank Mann was really born Heinrich von Mannheim: of course not, and he never made a movie called Paracelsus with Charles Laughton).
While I researched my thesis, I was rooming back there in the city in an apartment over a New Age bookshop-cum-healthfood restaurant with a science fiction freak I’d met at a much earlier stage of studenthood during the chance intimacy of the mutual runs in Barcelona. Now he and I subsisted on brown rice courtesy of the Japanese waitress from downstairs, with whom we were both on, ahem, intimate terms, and he was always talking about aliens. He thought most of the people you met on the streets were aliens cunningly simulating human beings. He thought the Venusians were behind it.
He said he had tested Hiroko’s reality quotient sufficiently and she was clear, but I guessed from his look he wasn’t too sure about me.
The Merchant of Shadows
