Inside the Bloody Chamber at OGOM Company of Wolves

In response to Bill’s post on Angela Carter I just wanted to remind everyone that Sir Christopher Frayling will be speaking exclusively on Angela Carter at the OGOM Company of Wolves Conference. He will be drawing directly on his friendship with Carter which he muses on in his new book, Inside the Bloody Chamber, published just a couple of days before the conference. Delegates will have the opportunity to get a copy signed by Sir Chris at the event. I can’t wait to hear more about the dialogue between them. Angela Carter’s influence on ‘the contemporary Gothic’ is both wide-ranging and profound. Sir Christopher Frayling knew Angela very well, when she lived in Bath in the 1970s, and when her key works – The Bloody Chamber, The Sadeian Woman, The Passion of New Eve – were being written. He was researching and writing his study of The Vampyre in literature, at this time, and he and Angela shared a lot of conversations, ideas and inspiration, often at the very witching hour. In fact, one of the stories in The Bloody Chamber – ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ – is based on his research visit to Transylvania in the spring of 1976; Frayling became ‘Hero’, a fine upstanding public school chap who encounters all sorts of erotic surprises on his travels…Angela published New Eve on the same day as The Vampyre, both with Victor Gollancz. Published to mark the 25th anniversary of her untimely death, Inside the Bloody Chamber gathers together some of Frayling’s articles, essays and lectures written since the 1980s on aspects of the Gothic – several in hard-to-find places, many never published before, but all revised for this new book. The subjects loosely match Angela’s interests – mirrored in the stories within The Bloody Chamber – and they mesh with his memories of the 1970s in Bath.