The Bloody Chamber

The same ornate prose admirers love gets called “convoluted, complicated, and nonsensical” by detractors, who complain about “sentences that never end” and abrupt, unexplained jumps within a scene. Several reviewers argue the feminist reputation is overstated, the heroines still defined by desire, marriage, and rescue, and one dismisses the retellings as though Carter “just copy the originals and added graphic details.” ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’ draws criticism as the weak link of the two Beauty and the Beast stories, predictable and cheesy next to its counterpart. ‘The Snow Child,’ barely a page long, draws the sharpest objections of the whole book, a critic calling its content simply “gross and wrong.”