"Carmilla" by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Have you ever fallen in love with someone you know you shouldn't...?

As you may have read in my Hill House review, I wasn't the biggest fan of vampires. There was something specifically about being attacked by something immortal in the middle of night that you couldn't see in a mirror that was something of an existential fear for me. I distinctly remember going through a Guatemalan worry doll nighttime ritual with my mom where I would assign a fear or worry to each doll in the set, and vampires would always make the rounds. It wasn't until I grew up and I realized that vampires could be sexy glitter machines while also being scary in an abusive way that my nighttime fears about vampires disappeared. I had lost my fear of vampires so completely that whenever I heard of any piece of media featuring vampires as the antagonist or the protagonist or as a concept, I was interested.

I'd never heard of Carmilla before 2014. Dracula? Of course. Who hasn't heard of the legendary name "Dracula"? But Carmilla? Didn't even know it existed. It wasn't until the web series adaptation premiered on YouTube that I'd ever heard of the name "Carmilla." Of course, once I'd watched the first season, I was hooked: a web series adaptation of a literary text that involves vampires and lesbians? There was no way that I wasn't going to be on board with something like this. It was instantly put on my annual Halloween watchlist ever since I watched the first season onward. I wouldn't have considered myself a hardcore Creampuff, but I was a casual watcher who wanted to follow along to the very end. So, as usual for when I find out that something I love is based on a pre-existing piece of literature, I thought "okay, let's check out Carmilla the novella!"

So, how does this tale of lesbian vampires stack up to the cultural revival of queer stories and the undead? Does this tale stand the test of time? Does it back up my childhood fear of vampires? How legendary is the tale that prompted Bram Stoker to write his famous novel, Dracula? Let's find out!

What's the book about?

Got a hankering for top-notch Gothic horror? Lose yourself in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, a titillating tale that centers on a lady-loving vampire who terrorizes an unsuspecting family in nineteenth-century Austria. Experts of the genre say that this novel exerted a significant influence on Bram Stoker when he was preparing to write Dracula.

(Summary from Goodreads)

When did I read this?

October 6 - 16

Positives:

+ The plot points were interesting.

+ The intrigue was compelling.

+ The revealing of the mystery behind Carmilla and the climax was when things really started getting interesting.

+ The romance was compelling... to a point.

+ 👏Lesbian👏vampire👏representation!👏

+ I could see which plot points and characters the Carmilla (2014) creators picked up for the 2014 web series.

Negatives:

- I couldn't get into the world of the story. The way that the story was formatted mostly played a role in this (where it's a distant account from a character remembering these events in the near-distant future), but the general late-1800's writing style doesn't pull me in like I'm used to with modern stories.

- It's a lesbian story written by a straight, 19th-century man.

- The romance in the story (what little there was of it) isn't written for character development: it's meant for readers of the times to go "Ooh! How scandalous! A girl in love with another girl?! The pure, chaste soul must be saved from the seductive clutches of evil!" (note the "titillating" part in the summary)

- Anything "multicultural"/non-heterosexual = evil.

Reality Check:

Seclusion, sudden illnesses and deaths within a short amount of time from each other, toxic relationships

Content Warning:

Blood, I guess... beheadings... idk. 🤷‍♀️

Is it a truly litassociative experience?

I don't know if it was the 19th-century European writing style that specifically was the issue or if it was the "titillating scandalous content" of it all that turned me off or that I'm slowly realizing that I don't vibe with the Duke Classics ebook publishing format, but it didn't captivate me like I hoped it would. Like The Turn of the Screw, I found myself skimming over some of the paragraph descriptions until something interesting or web-series-related caught my eye (though Carmilla was admittedly more engaging to me than Henry James' spooky novella-turned-heartbreaking-Netflix-series). When I thought that the potential chemistry between Laura and Carmilla was going somewhere, it fizzled out and turn into "oh no. We're not going here. This is not happening. She's an evil presence that needs to be destroyed", which... okay. It's fine, I guess. They had perfectly good reason to, since people were dropping like flies one by one, but...

Honestly, what else was I going to expect from a Victorian story written by a "chip-off-the-old-block" male author?

So, long story short, Carmilla disappointed me. I didn't think that it would be wildly progressive for the time that it was written and published, but when I heard "lesbian vampire," I thought that there would be a little more to that then just "toxic undead lady-loving succubus 😏". Damn my 21st-century expectations! The only truly good things about the story in my mind were the fact that it inspired Dracula a little over 25 years later — which I loved a lot more than this — and that it was inspiring enough to someone to the point where they made a modern web series adaptation nearly 150 years afterwards.

If you want to check this story out for yourself, then cool. If you've already read it and like it, cool. Otherwise, go and watch the web series, or listen to the Carmilla cast's reading of the novella. Whichever option you pick, it's going to be way more engaging than the original.

Carmilla can be found at your local library and/or your nearest bookstore.

Final rating: