A review by thereadingrambler
Carmilla: The First Vampire by Amy Chu

3.0

I’m going to be honest, I’m not much of a comic/graphic novel person. They usually just don’t emotionally pull me in as much as non-image texts. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy them well enough, they just aren’t the first thing I reach for usually. I picked this up because it is a Bram Stoker winner, and I have a YouTube series reading a bunch of the SFFH winners for each year. While I still had the personal problem of not emotionally connecting to the characters or plot, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who likes a vampire story. As you might be able to guess by the title, this book is engaging with the classic vampire story of Carmilla. It does so very directly but also in clever new ways that cause the story to unfold even more. The story focuses on Athena, who is an Asian-American social worker in NYC during the 90s, and her quest to figure out where these young homeless girls are disappearing. Because of the reader’s meta-knowledge, we know it is a vampire, so the dread comes from watching Athena walk into the vampire’s web without knowing it. I was particularly struck but the final page of the first chapter, depicting her directly inviting someone into her house. That’s the first moment the reader can guess who the vampire is, and you get this sense of how Athena’s life is about to fall apart, and she doesn’t even know it yet. I can definitely see why this won an award, and I hope more