But does it live up to the hype? Yes, and some. You may have heard the big talking point around Carmilla, a queer vampire story published as a serial in The Dark Blue (later collected in La Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly) in 1871 and predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) by several decades. Step aside, Dracula, Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu is my new yardstick for vampiric stories. However, it's still an important book in literature history. It's clear that Carmilla started all and the reality is that anybody else copied FROM it, but sadly, in many case, readers find the book way after of being already too familiar with the general world of vampires, diminishing the shock that the book could ever do.
The clues to the real nature of Carmilla are elegant and stylish but too evident for any reader familiar with vampire-related similar books, movies, TV series, etc. Maybe the only trouble with Carmilla to be read by current readers is its form of mystery that it's impossible that anybody would pick nowadays this particular novel to read without the previous knowledge that Carmilla is a vampire, and due that, the reader felt like reading a mystery where one already knows the answer to the mystery. Le Fanú also was the father of the Gothic horror of Britain establishing the style of how that kind of literature would be written even on these days. Nevertheless, life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either.
Without Carmilla there weren't Dracula and due that maybe there weren't a vampire sub-genre in the horror books that now it's one of the strongest subjects in modern paranormal literature. Of course, that was a trick by the author but it worked since the book didn't have any trouble to be published in those times when there was a extremely close-minded attitude.Īnd certainly the importance of the book to the eventual sucess of Bram Stoker's novel was fundamental. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanú was ingenious in that, since when he was asked about, he just replied that it wasn't a homosexual situation since Carmilla was a vampire and due that, it was a creature without sexual genre.
Some may wonder how it was possible to publish a book with lesbian issues in 1872. So, it was a pioneer book in two subjects: Vampires and Lesbian literature. This is a very important book in historic sense, in the genre of vampire reading, due that it was published 25 years before than Dracula.Īlso, it presented lesbian situations, easily one of the first open mentions of the topic in literature. But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together.
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