1. It started life as a radio play, Vampirella (first broadcast in 1'76, so probably written well before the rest of this collection, which Carter said she wrote mostly during her time in Sheffield, where she was Arts Council Fellow from 1'76–78). Carter, an avid reader of Anne Rice‘s vampire novels, said the idea for the radio play came to her when she was sitting idly trying to work and ran a pencil along the top of a radiator – "It was just the noise that a long, pointed fingernail might make if it were run along the bars of a birdcage." Finally, three disparate werewolf tales work and rework the story of Red Riding Hood, borrowing variants from different centuries, compulsively circling the figures of the werewolf, the old woman and the young girl.