Virago Modern Classic Book Club: Shadow Dance by Angela Carter

Virago Modern Classics Book Club

May 2020

SHADOW DANCE

by Angela Carter

The scar drew her whole face sideways and even in profile, with the hideous thing turned away, her face was horribly lop-sided, skin, features and all, dragged away from the bone. She was a beautiful girl, a white and golden girl, like moonlight on daisies, a month ago.’

And yet the men still hover around her, more out of curiosity than lust, and none more so than the wildly seductive, dangerous funny man, Honeybuzzard; lithe as a stick of liquorice, he is the demonic puppet master at the swirling centre of the tale.

‘In a modern day horror story gleaming with perfect 1960’s detail, she performs a double act, conjuring up just the right amount of unease and perversion beneath the idiosyncratic business of relatively ordinary lives’ – The Times