So I’ve started reading Something in the Blood by David J. Skal, which is a very good biography of Bram Stoker. (By the way: I tried to sign up to be an Amazon associate so I could make some cash on linking these books but they canned me when no one bought anything so I dunno. Buy local!) It’s actually terribly engrossing and the author is a gay man himself, interested in that aspect of Stoker’s life. I’ll do a brief overview of the book when I’m done. We can do a chronological walk through Stoker’s life with Oscar Wilde and Henry Irving.
Before that though, the next chapter of Reading the Vampire is about Carmilla. I’ve already read the chapter but before I write about it I thought we should read Carmilla itself as a perverted little family.
I do have a little story about Carmilla. I’ve never read it, but my surrogate father—who I’ve mentioned before now—once came to me to ask if I’d heard of it. He knew I was a lesbian and we had been trading books and recommendations back and forth. I told him I’d heard of Carmilla and I hadn’t read it. We agreed to read it at the same time and he confessed he would feel less embarrassed to read a book about lesbian vampires if he was doing it with me. Dude had a lot of weird unexamined homophobia but I suspect in this case that he wasn’t sure whether to expect it to be sexy lesbian pornography or what. I’m not sure he read it before he passed away last year, so this one’s for you, Tony.
The author of Carmilla, Sheridan Le Fanu, was an Irish man, and we know for sure that Stoker read his work, although according to Skal, we don’t know when he may have read Carmilla, only that he probably did read it because Dracula exists. Makes me desperately want a pretty volume of all of his stories, though Carmilla appears to be the only one of his works to survive in regular publication, thanks to Dracula. It’s a novella, so longer than your average short story, but it’s quite dense to summarize so I think we might have to do it in three parts or so.
I got a hard copy for my personal nerdy library, but if you like you can read it for free on Project Gutenberg here. I’ll be grabbing quoted text from there.
Let’s go!
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