The reading group selection for October is Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu. Our discussion will be held Wednesday, October 25 at 7:00 PM online via Zoom. The Zoom link will be sent the afternoon of the meeting to anyone interested in attending. Email bookbeatorders@gmail.com to sign up. Books are in stock now and discounted 15%. Please call (248) 968-1190 for more information.
One of the earliest works of vampire literature, Carmilla has inspired many books and films including Dracula, Carl Dryer’s Vampyr, and Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles. It was first serialised in the magazine The Dark Blue in 1871 and 1872 with illustrations by David Henry Friston and Michael Fitzgerald. The story is also noteworthy in that it challanges traditional Victorian views of womanhood and lesbianism.
From the publisher’s website:
In an isolated castle deep in the Austrian forest, Laura leads a solitary life with only her ailing father for company. Until one moonlit night, a horse-drawn carriage crashes into view, carrying an unexpected guest – the beautiful Carmilla.
So begins a feverish friendship between Laura and her mysterious, entrancing companion. But as Carmilla becomes increasingly strange and volatile, prone to eerie nocturnal wanderings, Laura finds herself tormented by nightmares and growing weaker by the day…
Pre-dating Dracula by twenty-six years, Carmilla is the original vampire story, steeped in sexual tension and gothic romance.
“Carmilla exists pre-Dracula, which makes it the unfortunate Hydrox cookie of vampire novels: first, not most famous. The reason it languishes, I’d guess, is the identity of its villain. Carmilla is female, not male, and that put her pursuit and seduction of a young female victim in a different light than Dracula’s. It upends the patriarchal norm on which Dracula rests: the powerful man dominating the passive woman, captivating her, draining her of life. The only acceptable female sexual desire derives from a spell, not from her own volition. In Carmilla, this is not so. Carmilla is dominant, seductive. She desires, and she ravishes. Shocking.” —Katherine Coldiron, Vol. 1 Brooklyn
Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) was an Irish writer of gothic tales, mystery novels and ghost stories. The Purcell Papers, written while he was a student, show his mastery of the supernatural and were collected in three volumes in 1880. Between 1845 and 1873 he published 14 novels, of which Uncle Silas (1864) and The House by the Churchyard (1863) are the best known. He contributed numerous short stories, mostly of ghosts and the supernatural, to the Dublin University Magazine, which he owned and edited from 1861 to 1869. In a Glass Darkly (1872), a book of five long stories, is generally regarded as his best work; it includes his classic story Carmilla, which popularized the theme of the female vampire. Le Fanu also owned the Dublin Evening Mail and other newspapers.