The Bloody Chamber

Angela Carter bristled when she heard these stories described as "retellings" of classic tales, and the loathed the term "adult fairy tale" that appeared on the first American edition. She aimed to re-imagine the tales to get to their essence. Her re-imaginings would not have been possible for the correspondents who related the stories to the Grimm brothers or Charles Perrault, and the essence she finds in them clearly come the mind of a twentieth-century literary feminist with a wickedly funny imagination.

The Bloody Chamber is one of Carter's most popular books with good reason. It is simply great fun to see stories we have known since childhood overturned by either the slightest shifts in tone or the wildest possible embellishments. Carter puts "Beauty and the Beast," "Puss in Boots," "Little Red Riding Hood," and others on her operating table just see what she finds inside there. My personal favorite is her transformation of Sleeping Beauty into "The Lady of the House of Love." She takes what she needs from the original and adds a vampire story and a portrait of that generation of young men unaware of the horrors they will soon face in the trenches of WWI.

And the writing is exquisite. (That's really the best word for it.) This is from "The Erl King."

...It is easy to lose yourself in these woods.
The two notes of the song of a bird rose on the still air, as if my girlish and delicious loneliness had been made into a sound. There was a little tangled mist in the thickets, mimicking the tufts of old man's beard that flossed the lower branches of the trees and bushes: heavy bunches of red berries as ripe and delicious as goblin or enchanted fruit hung on the hawthorns but the old grass withers, retreats. One by one, the ferns have curled up their hundred eyes and curled back into the earth. The trees threaded a cat's cradle of half-stripped branches over me so that if felt I was in a house of nets and though the cold wind that always heralds your presence, had I but known in then, blew gentle around me, I thought that nobody was in the wood but me.
Erl-King will do you grievous harm.