I guess I’m eating my words about not liking the writing style of classics, huh?

I loved the writing style of this book. It was atmospheric and gothic, I loved the setting of the castle and the grassy hills and the ruins of the old town. I just pictured fog over everything anytime they were outside. Now I just wanna have a picnic at old castle ruins in the fog with a pretty vampire. (Sadly that doesn’t happen in this book but it could’ve). This might be my favorite classic I’ve read so far… it’s at least tied with Dracula, but I think it tops it. It actually got pretty creepy at times.

Was also a little surprised how explicitly sapphic it was, given when it was written. I was expecting it to just be homoerotic in the way that classics sometimes are, or overtly homophobic. I think it’s safe to assume that the combination of sapphic elements and vampirism was very intentional..  automatically villainizing lesbianism by portraying it as a ‘virus’ that you can ‘catch’, something that’s evil and scary… But reading it it isn’t actually explicitly homophobic. It’s all subtext. It could easily be read through a more modern lens, removing that subtext.

My only complaints:

•The racism. It’s only in one or two scenes, but it’s pretty bad in one scene especially.

•How naive Laura was, especially at the very end. She was supposed to be 19, right? How did she not connect the dots after the general’s story??? 😆

•It ended a bit abruptly, I felt.

•And lastly, I just wish we got more pretty atmospheric descriptions of the ruins. I was waiting the whole book for them to go there and when they did we didn’t get much :/ I would’ve liked more atmospheric descriptions in general, but at least we got some.

Overall, I’m really happy I liked this! I was starting to worry that classics just weren’t for me. Hopefully there are still more out there that I’ll love.

This book was everything I expected it to be before reading, a classic tale of the supernatural but with a feminine twist! This book drew me in and I finished it all in one sitting… truly a mesmerising piece of art!

As my first foray into the Victorian vampire (beyond watching Bram Stoker's Dracula) this was super intriguing, and it's made me really excited to sit down and read more. 

I really like the Victorian style of horror shorts: the drip fed hints that nothing is as it seems, the dramatic setting, and the even more dramatic idea of someone sitting down years later to sigh and exclaim over this 'terrible' thing that happened in their past was. I fell in love with this way of writing horror reading Frankenstein in high school and I always forget how good it is until I pick up another. This was no exception to the rule: I really enjoyed it. It was creepy, the writing was really enjoyable, and the vampire lore was so interesting.

All that said, there's no escaping that the original intent behind this story is a bit homophobic. The idea of monsterhood and queerness being intrinsically tied together, and that you should be afraid of someone because of their queerness, is clearly a terrible opinion. (Using monsterhood as a metaphor so that people can explore their feeling of otherness without facing direct phobia is a different matter entirely, and I don't think this book is trying to do that.) As a modern reader it's not hard to just read this as a queer woman having been turned into a vampire, and Carmilla's predatory tendencies being only related to her vampire nature - and I think that's the way to approach it, with the writer long dead and the way the story has been embraced by queer women. There's certainly wiggle room within the original text to see it as Laura trying to come to terms with her own queerness, too, but due to society, the men in her life, and the whole vampire thing she's never allowed to. Because the story never outright says being a lesbian is bad, just the monsterhood of Carmilla, a modern reader can escape the homophobia.

I think it's one to read if you like Victorian classics and vampires, but not necessarily one to go to if you're looking for older queer books.