“The Werewolf” (1979)

[spoilers] In the Angela Carter collection The Bloody Chamber, this very short story is the first of three meditations on Little Red Riding Hood to finish the book. It might be the best—short and keeping the details blunt. The “good child” has no name, no red garments. The fairy tale comes to mind only because it involves a girl, a wolf, and the girl’s grandmother. The grandmother has been feeling under the weather and the girl is dispatched to bring her oatcakes and honey. On the way there she is attacked by a wolf, which she fends off with a knife like a badass. “Here, take your father’s hunting knife, you know how to use it.” That’s a voice in her head, no doubt her mother’s. She faces the wolf head-on, drops her things, squares up, and takes the knife. “[S]he made a great swipe at it ... and slashed off its right forepaw.” The wolf goes “lolloping off disconsolately.... The child wiped the blade of her knife clean on her apron, wrapped up the wolf’s paw in the cloth in which her mother had packed the oatcakes and went on toward her grandmother’s house.” The spoiler alert goes right here because the ending surprised me, although you may have already guessed it. The grandmother seems to be sicker than ever. She is burning with fever. The girl takes the cloth with the wolf’s paw to make a cold compress for Grandmother’s forehead. But the paw is now a human hand. And soon the girl discovers that Grandmother is now missing a hand. Grandmother is the werewolf! The girl calls for help, the neighbors show, recognize her for a witch, and “drove the old woman, in her shift as she was, out into the snow with sticks, beating her old carcass as far as the edge of the forest, and pelted her with stones until she fell down dead.” And that’s the end of the story, except for one last paragraph: “Now the child lived in her grandmother’s house; she prospered.” Amazingly savage, amazingly straightforward about it, and all matter-of-fact. I just didn’t see any of these plot developments coming and it took my breath away.

Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats
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