Wolf-Alice by Angela Carter, 1979
The magic trick:
Beautifully rich prose
And here I thought Wolf Alice was just a band.
Little did I know the English group took its name from a story in the famed Angela Carter collection The Bloody Chamber.
It’s an exceptionally creepy story of a feral girl who goes to live with a grave-robbing werewolf.
That all might sound silly, but it’s written in beautifully rich prose. So even if you’re like me and don’t usually go in for the fantasy fairy tale stuff, you can still revel in the surface-level pleasures or the words.
And that’s quite a trick on Carter’s part.
The selection:
Spilt, glistering milk of moonlight on the frost-crisped grass; on such a night, in moony, metamorphic weather, they say you might easily find him, if you had been foolish enough to venture out late, scuttling along by the churchyard wall with half a juicy torso slung across his back. The white light scours the fields and scours them again until everything gleams and he will leave paw-prints in the hoar-frost when he runs howling round the graves at night in his lupine fiestas.
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I’m a fan of the band’s music and didn’t know this! Now I have to read that story!