Shit is about to get spicy.
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!
Here we are at the end! Seven years later! What is our harem up to?
Here we are on the precipice! I’m writing this later than intended and I’m tired but I want to do it live.
It’s November 5th and even though I knew we were nearing the end, I find it still catching up to me. The finale is tomorrow, and the epilogue comes on the 7th. So for the next three days I’ll be updating daily to keep up with it.
I believe I’ve said it a few times already but just to leave it at the top: the end of Dracula isn’t the end of Let’s Read Dracula Like a Fujoshi. I’ve started a bunch of shit that I plan to finish so we all leave here fully informed on the horny history of Dracula and Stoker. I have Reading the Vampire and a few essays lying around to get through yet. I’ve been working on those. I guess 2023 is just going to be my Dracula year. I’m hoping it doesn’t bleed too much into 2024.
Away we go.
I’ve been reading my other Dracula books for content once we get to the finale. I hope you look forward to me never shutting up about Dracula ever. I have a bit of an inferiority complex I guess and I feel like if I’m going to be able to really draw this whole Let’s Read together I still have some homework to do.
Hello my friends!
After being 20 degrees Celsius the other day, today it is snowing and very cold and I’m a real weenie about it. I feel bad for the poor kids who had to go out in the cold on Halloween, but it is usually chilly for Halloween.
I went over to a pal’s house for the holiday and we played Night Trap. We got so into it we nearly missed kids coming and knocking on the door for candy. It was a great time.
It’s Halloween in Dracula too so let’s go back a day.
The other day it was 20 Celsius and today it’s cold as hell. I told myself I’d go do something and get some exercise but instead I stayed inside with my heat on. Probably the wrong choice but I’m a real weenie about the cold.
I ordered a gorgeous copy of Carmilla that arrived in the mail today, so look forward to me adding that to the blog in our Dracula Daily afterparty. I need some fiction to sprinkle in between all the academic papers I need to read in the interests of completionism.
So a couple friends of mine—I want to say they’re “work friends” but we’re all freelancers who live on different parts of the planet and share a discord channel—went to see two different performances of Dracula as a ballet performance. The one in Salt Lake City apparently had Dracula swimming in brides, while the one in Milwaukee had the standard three, and is apparently very spicy. I stole some images from this tumblr that took screenshots of a sexy Dracula/Jonathan pas de deux.
There’s more. Go see for yourself. I kinda miss being in Romania. I encourage everyone reading this to check out their local theatre and ballet shows.
I have no good excuse for why I didn’t write this up sooner, I just didn’t want to have a bunch of entries that were like, “we’re waiting. We’re waiting some more!” The “suspense” is killing me.
I got my flu shot and covid booster at the same time yesterday and I feel like I have a distant and weak flu that is turning me into a cranky baby.
I’m going to blast through all the waiting as fast as possible. I hope you don’t mind.
Good morning friends! Halloween approaches and I’m considering some kind of cheap vampire costume to greet trick-or-treaters with but also I’m sooooo lazy.