Carmilla Review

In an isolated castle deep in the Austrian forest, Laura leads a solitary life with only her ailing father for company.

–GoodReads

MY REVIEW

Thanks to a friend sending me a cool factoid thing on messenger which I then checked out to see if it was real…I ran not walked to check this book out.

A book that predates Dracula by like 20ish years and this first vampire is a woman and lesbian?

I’ll take six please.

But I was also curious as to what this version of vampires would be and I was not disappointed!

La Fanu has such a nice gothic take on this, I know it’s written in that period where everything is beautifully gothic 85% of the time. This is such a great foundation of vampire literature, it’s easy to see how Stoker was inspired by La Fanu and his Carmilla. There is this creepy feeling of always being watched for the MC Laura, even if she doesn’t realize it, we as readers do and it makes it so much better that way.

Carmilla is infatuated with Laura, and Laura seems to return it even if not the intensity of it but there’s something not quite right about Carmilla and again we know this, we realize what this probably is but Laura is so blissfully unaware and you are just waiting for her to realize it or for the worst to happen.

Carmilla is so interesting, the way she falls into this love or infatuation (or both) with Laura is just so…casual and I think that’s my favorite part about it. Laura and Carmilla don’t really question that part of it, and that’s probably how Laura remains so unaware of anything odd about Carmilla’s mannerisms. And Carmilla does have some weird habits, but being a girl from what appears to be a well to do family and with the right sort of literal manners means Carmilla can excuse away a lot of her eccentricities to her hosts. Also Carmilla is quite brilliant, I love how she’s so sly, like, just love it.

There’s an abandoned village, a large house with only a few people, specters, young women mysteriously getting sick and dying, and an old painting that looks eerily like someone in the house…and yes I’m keeping it as vague as I can.

This is really a novella more than a book, about 90 something pages or just over a 100 depending on the edition you have but it’s such a quick atmospheric read and I think that makes it the perfect read for any Vampire lover or someone trying to find something mildly ‘scary’ for this season.

4/5 Cups of coffee from me, I’ll definitely be giving this one a reread in the future and expect a film vs book post in the near future!