The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
by Angela Carter
Narrated by Richard Armitage, Emilia Fox
Why Listen to This Audiobook?
Richard Armitage and Emilia Fox make Carter's fairy tales feel like something whispered in the dark — equal parts seductive and unsettling.
- Great if you want: feminist retellings with teeth, darkness, and literary ambition
- Listening experience: lush and hypnotic — best absorbed in short, deliberate sessions
- Narration: Armitage's deep gravitas and Fox's cool precision suit Carter's gothic duality perfectly
- Skip if: you prefer plot-driven horror over lyrical, symbol-heavy prose
About This Audiobook
Angela Carter takes the fairy tales that most children know, Beauty and the Beast, Bluebeard, Red Riding Hood, and remakes them from the inside out, stripping away the moral tidiness and restoring the darkness, sexuality, and violence that the originals once contained before they were domesticated. The Bloody Chamber is a feminist reclamation that is also a demonstration of what prose can do: Carter's sentences are constructed with an almost architectural intensity, every phrase earning its place.
Richard Armitage and Emilia Fox share the narration in a production that honors the stories' theatrical quality, Armitage's voice providing the weight of the masculine world these women inhabit and Fox giving the female perspectives their full interior depth. The Cheltenham Prize-winning collection is among the most important works of twentieth-century British fiction, and this production treats it as such. At just under seven hours, The Bloody Chamber rewards listeners who bring full attention to every sentence.