Carmilla
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, 1872
A lonely girl in a castle falls for a beautiful guest who arrives by night—a vampire story told through desire, dread and ambiguity.
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
1814–1873
Le Fanu writes quiet, close-up dread: a house at night, a guest who may not be what she seems, a man who cannot shake what follows him. Start with «Carmilla», a short vampire tale of longing and unease, or with «In a Glass Darkly, v. 1/3», where a doctor's case files turn ordinary rooms strange. Both share a patient, unsettling atmosphere rather than shocks, and are worth reading for the way they make you look twice at the dark.
Feels like dread, unease and death.
Start with Carmilla.
A Dublin editor and ghost-story writer, Le Fanu first published Carmilla as a serial in the magazine Dark Blue, a quarter-century before Dracula appeared.
The words that sound like love until you hear the threat inside them.
Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardor of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet over-powering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever.” Then she had thrown herself back in her chair, with her small hands over her eyes, leaving me trembling. Books by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
In a Glass Darkly, v. 1/3
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, 1872
Three case files from a doctor of the occult: a clergyman stalked by a monkey, a man followed by his own footsteps, a hanging judge whose house has other tenants.
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