She seemed always on the verge of bestowing something—some talisman, some magic token you'd need to get through the dark forest, some verbal formula useful for the opening of charmed doors.
Such were the terms in which her canonization, which had been under way for a while, crystallized upon her death. She was a wolf in Granny's clothing to the end, even though she became of central importance to British writing in the later 1980s and 1990s.
She began her career on the margins, as a member of 1960s counterculture—“the savage sideshow,” as she wryly called it. “We live in Gothic times,” she wrote in an afterword (later dropped) to her 1974 collection of tales, Fireworks. At the time she was writing, Gothic tales, along with romance, pornography, science fiction, and fairy tale, were firmly set aside from the literary novel as genre fiction. Carter's assertion implied that since the times themselves were splintered and fraught with violent mythology, such subgenres were now the appropriate and central ones.
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