Carmilla

Jordan Hall said it best: “this ethereal, infuriating book”

Reader's log: • Came for Carmilla Karnstein, stayed for the mystical moon child Mademoiselle De Lafontaine • Steamiest passage: “A small income in that part of the world goes a great way; eight or nine hundred a year does wonders.” [Half] kidding. It's probably: “Sometimes there came a sensation as if a hand was drawn softly along my cheek and neck. Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, longer and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat...” • Langor¹⁷ • Everything I could want in a good Gothic — dark, damp, and dusty castles, dramatic carriage wrecks, creepy portraits, unexplainable maladies, strange dreams, mysterious strangers, a story within a story...

Now, how many stars should I knock off for the author promulgating the whole ‘queer women as monsters' trope?

Thank goodness for Lanternfish's edition, which is Le Fanu's Carmilla, kintsugi'd. Carmen Maria Machado's edits and commentary make this 1872 Gothic much more accessible. And the modern reframing of the narrative adds nuance while turning the monstrous lesbian trope back onto its makers, whose “own accounts become highly suspect.” “I wished this edition to bear LaFanu's shame,” Machado writes. “I wish the reader to come to the book with a complete understanding of its inadequacy.”

Now that's the punk rock Mary Shelley energy I'm here for.

And how about those illustrations by tattoo artist Robert Kraiza?

This was a fantastic, short little vampire tale! While reading it, you can definitely see a lot of the tropes common to more recent vampire stories, but seeing tropes being first established is something I always find interest. The narration of the story seems much more fresh and contemporary than most Victorian literature, and it was interesting to see such explicit lesbian content from an era that mostly frowned upon it.