May 7, 2025, 9:30am
According to the powers that be (er, apparently according to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network), May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, for the third year in a row, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending a single short story, free* to read online, every (work) day of the month. Why not read along with us? Today, we recommend:
Angela Carter, “The Company of Wolves”
It’s hard not to love Angela Carter: the luscious, playful prose, the sense of brutality, the formal experimentation, the surprise. This, the penultimate story in The Bloody Chamber, Carter’s influential collection of reworked fairy tales, is one of my favorites of hers. Every time I read it, I expect a different outcome. Every time I read it, I see something I missed. Every time I read it, I feel a fire burning. What better to fend off the wolves?
The story begins:
One beast and only one howls in the woods by night.
The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he’s as cunning as he is ferocious; once he’s had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do.
At night, the eyes of wolves shine like candle flames, yellowish, reddish, but that is because the pupils of their eyes fatten on darkness and catch the light from your lantern to flash it back to you—red for danger; if a wolf’s eyes reflect only moonlight, then they gleam a cold and unnatural green, a mineral, a piercing colour. If the benighted traveller spies those luminous, terrible sequins stitched suddenly on the black thickets, then he knows he must run, if fear has not struck him stock-still.
Read it here.
*If you hit a paywall, we recommend trying with a different/private/incognito browser (but listen, you didn’t hear it from us).