Review by selkiesandseafoam - Carmilla

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selkiesandseafoam 's review for:

Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

3.75

dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

"Love will have its sacrifices. No sacrifice without blood."

Carmilla opens gothic, rich, and eerie, with feverish, fantastic descriptions and striking character introductions. But like many books of the time, I find the immersive scene setting to instead drag on, and I ended up struggling through a few pages every couple days until Carmilla herself appeared. But when she did, I devoured the novella in two days.

For a book titled after her, Carmilla doesn’t appear for all that long – of course she haunts the narrative, but you’re not aware of this until the end. Perhaps you’re meant to miss her presence as Laura does, but Laura is retelling the story some years later in a compiled report as a passive character with little agency in it - especially the latter half - aforementioned agency having been surrendered to mostly hollow male side characters, who in modern day serve more as the villain than Carmilla, the life draining predator. This makes the already predictable (although satisfying to confirm) plot already weighed down by repetition and similar quirks here and there, rather tedious and leaves me wanting more on many accounts that isn’t on offer.

"but curiosity is a restless and scrupulous passion, and no one girl can endure, with patience, that hers should be baffled by another."

That’s not to say of course, that Laura isn’t engaging, she’s a curious and kind character who's easy to root for. Her relationship with Carmilla is tenderly erotic, sensual, and pleasantly overt despite the time. And Chapters 3-9 had me beguiled. Both Carmilla and her relationship with Laura mesmerise all those around - reader included. I’m a big fan of vampires and I find the lore itself here layered and compelling, favourably differing from modern iterations and lays out several gothic tropes- many it probably invented too – beautifully.

"She used to place her pretty arms about my neck, draw me to her, and laying her cheek to mine, murmur with her lips near my ear, “Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours."

Carmilla’s vampirism is seductive, undead and ambiguous, and the novella Carmilla as a whole, much to modern reader’s delight, utterly fails as a homophobic cautionary tale nowadays.

"You are afraid to die?'
Yes, everyone is.'
But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together."

As I mentioned previously, the pacing is awful; multiple chapters are spent with these dreary men, each with perfect memory, recounting their encounters; what came both before and after, and every irrelevant syllable of what one or another character said, in excruciating detail. All while the others piece things together mind numbingly slow and appear to be too polite to interrupt them. Laura can get a pass on this – delirious from death's door and wishing for Carmilla’s return. Her father claiming to protect her? Nottt so much.

The conclusion is frustrating. The last parts are a splendid metaphor and the gay, haunted yearning makes up for it some, but only to really direct me to search for retellings and fanfictions. The one character who speaks of Carmilla in the end chooses to shut up for once, and I’m left feeling like Carmilla’s half developed rather than mysterious with everything else that occurred in the end. It’s not that I want it to be explicitly stated, it’s simply not even there, nor left unsaid. Le Fanu is clearly capable of layers and detail - this treatment is just not given in equity to women. It’s too dated to be admirable - although he subverts a few patriarchal tropes, the authors misogny damages the characters, and the votalite racist passage is out of place. It's too rich for a novella, and too much is left to be desired.

Nevertheless, It’s a classic, and appealing to some despite the many faults.

Content Warnings