It was hard to read Wolf Parts without seeing the shadow of Angela Carter, who has “owned” the Red Riding Hood story for so long. Like Carter’s versions of the story in The Bloody Chamber, these fragmentary retellings by Matt Bell explore it from different angles. Power shifts from predator to prey and back again, and sexual, gender, and community identities are tried out in different combinations. Whereas Carter’s versions were more narrative and linear, Bell’s are a kind of Golberg Variations: repeated language and images tried out in different shapes, adding up to a virtuoso display much more than its individual parts might suggest. There’s also a meta-level to the stories that strikes just the right balance between self-awareness and subtly. In the repeated occurrence of characters changing their voices and bodies, wearing disguises and mimicking each other, there’s a provocative inquiry into the nature of storytelling and of tearing this “familiar” (soon unfamiliar) story apart to see it from other perspectives, even inside out through the ribs and guts of the wolf as Grandmother does. There are, the book proves, many “Ways to cut yourself out from inside a wolf or, in other circumstances, to cut your way back in.” So although I began reading Wolf Parts thinking, “But hasn’t Angela Carter already done this?” I shook that suspicion off quickly because this is very much it’s own book, and deserving of a place beside The Bloody Chamber on the Red Riding Hood shelf.

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