Published after Carter’s death, this final collection of short fiction divides its attention between the manufactured myths of America and the inherited nightmares of Europe.

The American stories move through Lizzie Borden, Hollywood, the Western and the national appetite for turning violence into entertainment; the Old World pieces return to pantomime, folklore, Renaissance painting and fairy tale. Carter treats none of these traditions as sacred property. She opens them up, rummages through the machinery, then rebuilds them with the gender roles reversed and the blood left visible.

The collection is stranger and more uneven than The Bloody Chamber, but also broader in its cultural range: part folklore cabinet, part American hallucination, part late statement on storytelling itself. For readers of revisionist fairy tales, feminist gothic, metafiction and literature that regards civilisation as a costume with dubious stitching. 

First edition, first hardback. Chatto & Windus, 1993. Very good in dust jacket, w