"CHAPTER IV: HER HABITS—A SAUNTER"
Carmilla (from 1871!) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and edited by Carmen Maria Machado is 5 x 8 x 0.4 inches & 139 vampiric pages.
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The two things I knew about the 1871 novel Carmilla were:
(1) Carmilla is a pre-Dracula vampire novella (inconsequential to me, personally, but I do kinda savor that bitter underdog, overlooked intensity that contaminates something that was famously outpaced)
(2) Carmilla contains an explicitly queer dynamic between two aristocratic women (and to that, I thought, I’ll believe it when I see it)
See this queer eroticism, I did! It was the same as my oft-cited experience of reading only the first sixty pages of Moby Dick. No subtext to sift through between Laura and Carmilla. The sex is on screen.
And as with any story that centers on a villain, the descriptions of Carmilla are simply delicious. This is the title of the chapter that introduces Carmilla’s arrival:
And then this note on Carmilla’s posture, followed by her first greeting to Laura:
I liked the narrator, Laura, a lot because she’ll also describe a friend of her father’s thusly:
There a luxury about how these characters—mysteriously wealthy, isolated in semi-crumbling castles with dangerous drawbridges, peering around foreboding tapestries—move, speak, glance. This is how Carmilla’s mother describes her future plans:
Why speak in any other way!
Rapidly and secretly yours,
ML
P.S. This 2019 publication from Lanternfish Press incorporates a very fun, very sly literary intervention from Carmen Maria Machado (in the introduction and well-placed footnotes) and it’s illustrated. Below is an exemplary page. I know! I just didn’t know how to bring it up before now.
