Sunday, 19 August 2012

Precursor: I am becoming increasingly terrified by these stories. Please make them stop.
The Erl-King

The Erl-King is (I think) a goblin, who lives in a cottage, in the middle of a dark forest that is teeming with life. He has a deep affinity with nature and seems to coexist quite well with the plethora of animals. A girl finds her way to his cottage and notes how he keeps birds in cages - he laughs off her accusations of animal cruelty (the RSPCA should have been called...) - and they have some rather intimate relations. At one point, the Erl-King bites the girl's neck (as y'do in Carter's sadomasochistic world) and she decides that she'd quite like to be a bird in a cage too. Eventually, she realises that the birds are all the Erl-King's past sexual playthings, and conspires to murder him in his sleep, thus freeing the birds. Then, I forget, but it's pretty much over at that point.

The Snow Child

There's this Count and Countess, and clearly, the Countess is a bit of a prude or has cystic ovaries or something, because the Count wants a little girl, but they don't have one. Anyway, the Count sees the snow, and wants a girl as white as snow. Then, he sees a pool of blood (because they're just dotted around everywhere...) and wants her red as blood. Then, he sees the black feathers of a raven, and wants her that black too. Now, ordinarily, there would be some ethnic mismatch here and whatever the outcome would be incredibly politically incorrect. However, Carter contrives to generate a pale skinned, red lipped, black haired girl. The Countess gets very jealous and attempts to kill her off, but the Count clearly quite likes his new girl. Some stuff happens, then the Count fucks the dead body of the girl... 
At this point, I stopped reading.

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