I thought vampires descended on helpless white Europeans from the East? And they’re supposed to be emotionally distant men that corrupt the minds of our women from afar? No one must’ve told Le Fanu when he put together this one twenty five years before Bram Stoker laughed at the collective fear of immigrants. But somehow, despite being at the party too early to get the genre fiction memo, Carmilla hits almost all the major points of a perfect vampire book. Perhaps the tropes actually descend more from Carmilla and Le Fanu than from Count Orlok and Stoker. And perhaps the depth of the themes in Dracula were looking at this little novella for inspiration in a heavily censored Victorian world.

We have the usual set pieces here. A girl on the edge of adulthood—our narrator—and her retired career soldier father live in an Austrian castle, a schloss, in near total seclusion. A governess and lady-in-waiting attend to things around the manor, but otherwise we see no other members of the vast household, or at least they aren’t interesting enough to make an appearance in the world as it’s seen by our narrator. She emphasizes the isolation of the family home, bought at a bargain. They are surrounded by first a moat and then miles of wilderness in every direction. Many of the nearby villages have been decimated by forces both unknown and unconsidered to the narrator (we eventually learn that her name is Laura).

Suddenly though, who should come into Laura’s life to save her from aristocratic malaise but one Carmilla, a young woman about Laura’s age who has been left to stay at the schloss by her mother after a carriage crash that was severe enough to hurl Laura’s body from the carriage and knock her unconscious. Luckily Father is willing to overlook this bout of negligent parenting and counter it with his own offer to let a stranger stay at his home for several months purely on the premise of her and her mother having been wealthy enough to both own a carriage and be needed somewhere urgently enough to crash said carriage in their blind pursuit. There’s something of a Kennedy family dismissal of caution into the Austrian wind.

From there our main deviation with the vampire story we all already have in our head is the intimacy of Carmilla. She isn’t just a quick exotic tryst to Laura—the two are good friends and any parasitism she engages in is much more long term than the typical deadbeat one-night-stand chauvinist vampire that we’re used to. While Laura is slowly yielding life to Carmilla we find out a few cryptic details of the houseguest’s background: she is from a very very old family, and she is vaguely from the West. In fact, and avoid going on if you haven’t read this book and are looking to avoid some light spoilers, Carmilla is actually descended from the same family as Laura’s mother. Her roots are actually deeper than Laura and her father’s who have moved into this dirt cheap dead real estate and continue to speak English in their new adopted home “patriotically.” The cracks in the visage of this folktale story start to form here and we begin to raise an eyebrow at Le Fanu’s Irish background. Ultimately our plausible deniability that this book might not be about Ireland go out the window when a plague starts to beset the countryside around the narrator’s home. It is treated as unserious until the aristocracy experience it in a firsthand way, as most plagues of course are. But it isn’t until the gentry are at death’s door that they seek the origin of this plague and a cure. But who knows, by the time a plague has destroyed the indigenous, perhaps the only ones left with knowledge old enough to save the privileged few might begin to form holes in their memories of folk tales and traditions.

Carmilla

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A Safdie vampire tale

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