Carmilla

A short little story, but I only read a chapter or two a night (and skipped some nights), so it took a while to get through. This little vampiric story is older than Dracula, and more sexual/erotic in its content (in this way, it has more in common with likely earlier drafts of Stoker's novel, which may exist in various foreign versions of Dracula). Overall, I liked this a lot. It's moody and shocking for its day, and I'm certain any mother or father who read this would have been appalled by it, which is a good mark of horror fiction. The vampire is a predator, obviously, and usually the vampire is coded as a sexual predator (or lover, in certain instances, if not abuser), but the vampire is almost always male. Count Dracula is fearsome because he plays into some Victorian notion of women and young girls falling prey to lecherous but suave men; but here, the main character, a young girl, falls prey to a female vampire, thus turning the whole trope on its head in an unexpected way. As a horror novel making use of mythological motifs in a specific cultural context, Carmilla asks if anyone is safe, since anyone can be a predator; furthermore, is the book about a father's attempt to suppress his daughter's developing homosexuality?

So the book is certainly interesting in those ways. Where I think it fails is in a few plot points that do not make any sense at all. The book leaves some things open-ended, but not in a mysterious way, only a frustrating way. For instance, who was Carmilla's mother? Another pet peeve of mine is the introduction of heroic characters in the last act, who sweep in to solve the narrative problems. Very, very annoying.

This was for my PopSugar reading challenge, and fulfills the “A book at least 100 years older than you” requirement - in fact this is almost exactly 100 years older than me, and I finished it on my birthday. Appropriate!

This was a lot of fun. Anyone with a passing knowledge of vampire fiction will see exactly what's going on in short order, and it might be tempting to complain that this uses a lot of tired tropes. But of course, this was preceded by only a few examples of vampire literature, and was a key point in the development from vampire folklore to modern vampire fiction. So it's not derivative, it's seminal! OK, the anagrammed names were silly - I'm glad that “rule” of vampires didn't catch on.

Surprisingly readable for something written in 1872, it was quick to get through, and didn't overstay its welcome. I definitely recommend this for anyone with an interest in the genre.