Steven Godin's Reviews > Black Venus

These eight inventive, sometimes bizarre, and fairy tale-ish stories were like nothing I've read in a long time. Although I'm left with mixed feeling overall, there is no doubt that in terms of writing short stories, Angela Carter had in her possession the ability to achieve maximum effect in a minimum amount of space. Carter might borrow most of her plots either from history, legend, or folklore, but what she did with the material is indisputably original, so I give her kudos for that.

There is the exploration and psychological states of Puck and the rest of the fairies just before the opening of Shakespeare's play in 'Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream'. American history provides the material for 'The Fall River Axe Murders' which was a sympathetic portrait of the nineteenth century murderess Lizzie Borden, and the 'The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe' was a similarly fictional/historical fable. Other stories 'The Kiss', 'Our Lady of the Massacre' and 'Peter and the Wolf' were OK, while 'The Kitchen Child' which I quite liked, sees a cook in an Edwardian country house being suddenly made love to by a mysterious stranger just as she is finishing a lobster souffle. My pick of the bunch though was 'Black Venus', which dealt with Jeanne Duval, the black mistress of the nineteenth century French poet Charles Baudelaire.

Stuff like this I wouldn't normally read, and I can't see myself going crazy for Carter books after this, but a little change from the norm every now and then can certainly be a good thing.