In 1979, two years after translating a selection of Perrault's fairytales, Carter published The Bloody Chamber, a series of "revisionings" of some of the best-known fairytales, including Bluebeard, Red Riding Hood and Beauty and the Beast. The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter is a savage piece of incest-themed gothic in the Ballardian Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest, a menacing magic begins to unfold after a girl is pricked (in fact, bitten) by a flower in Reflections, a rambler arrives at "a short, crumbling flight of steps that led to a weathered front door, ajar like the door of a witch's house". In her first collection, Fireworks (1974), the seam thickens discernibly. A fragment of fairytale glimmers in Carter's earliest work, The Man Who Loved a Double Bass (1962), where an inanimate object is treated as though alive, and helmets tucked beneath motorbikes gleam "whitely, like mushrooms or new laid eggs".
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