If you know me you know I'm wild about vampire stories. I'm wild enough about them that I'm writing a novel of my own. Most people think Dracula was the first big vampire story. I don't dispute the magnitude of Bram Stoker's accomplishment The novel Dracula is a wonderfully written I really like his use of letters and journal entries to develop characters and get inside their heads without using a narration from the writer. More so than in film adaptations you get to know Lucy intimately and feel sadness in her demise. But the fact is much of what he used was premiered 25 years earlier in 1872 by an Irish writer, J. Sheridan LeFanu in the novella Carmilla. The modern beautiful, charming vampires of Interview With the Vampire and True Blood owe much more to LeFanu's story than Dracula. The story is still in print and can be downloaded for free or in a paper book as part of the anthology, In a Glass Darkly. Carmilla is much depicted in art, usually as a dark, sinister creature with blood on her mouth and dressed like a modern day Goth or as the picture in my previous post, wearing nothing at all. The character as described in the book is not at all like that. She has a languid beauty and looks very much like an aristocratic young woman of the time which she was when she was alive. That is what made her so dangerous. The picture below is the truest I've found to the authors original vision. The book was written at the height of the Victorian era yet seethes with lesbian eroticism between Carmilla and Laura, the narrator of the story. Strangely, there has never been a good film rendition of the story.
Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, "You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever". ("Carmilla", Chapter 4).
Just for fun, Italian rockers Theatre des Vampires did a song and music video titled Carmilla. Unfortunately to comply with MTV's standards and practices, blood and murder were not allowed.
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