The Shape Shifter: Sarah Waters Pays Tribute to Angela Carter, 20 Years after Her Death

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My first encounter with Angela Carter's fiction came in 1984, when I was 18. This was the year that Carter collaborated with Neil Jordan on the film The Company of Wolves. Quite by chance, I caught a radio programme promoting the film and discussing Carter's collection of rewritten fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber, on which it was based. The idea of a book that seemed to mix Perrault and Grimm with Hammer Horror impressed me enormously. On a trip to Cardiff soon after, I went into a bookshop and sought out The Bloody Chamber.

Carter's writing was unlike anything I'd ever come across before: vivid, theatrical, full of dazzlingly rococo narrative swoops and a startling sexual bluntness. I read every bit of her writing I could lay my hands on. The Passion of New Eve and Heroes and Villains I discovered to be baroque apocalyptic fables, stories of sex change, sorcery, the epic struggle between civilisation and chaos. The Magic Toyshop I read as a Gothic story of adolescent awakening, of pleasure and fear. The Sadeian Woman, a piece of cultural criticism, daringly recast the Marquis de Sade as a …