Short Story Review Angela Carter Reflections

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1974 - Vintage Press - Spoiler alerts A very scary tale and unusually for Carter, one with a male hero, and villainous women. A man is wandering through some woodland, when he finds a mysterious heavy sea-shell, hundreds of miles from the ocean. Picking it up with difficulty, he is immediately assaulted by a pretty girl carrying a gun, and accompanied by a fierce dog. The girl leads him at gun-point to a large house, where a woman’s knitting spills down stairs and totally covers the floor. The knitter is a hideous witch, who seems to have both male and female genitalia. She is the gun girl’s mother, and orders the girl to throw the shell into the mirror, through which it plunges into another world. The hero is then forced to enter the mirror world, and the girl, Anna (her palindromic name is used with some ingenuity), goes with him through the mirror house into a reverse image of the forest, (a dark, negative version of itself). Here the girl rapes the man, but he takes her gun, killing her and the dog, and goes back through the mirror, killing the Mother too, who cackles at him that he is death. He sees the reflection of his new murderous self in the mirror and clearly freaks out over what he might have become. Arthur Chappell