Carmilla (Annotated)

"Carmilla beats out competition from James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire and Polidori’s The Vampyre for a spot on this list because it combines the thrills of the former with the art of the latter. Le Fanu’s tale of a young woman who falls prey to the attentions of the titular vampire is daring both in terms of its structure and its subject matter, addressing the erotic potential of vampirism nearly 20 years before Stoker’s Dracula." Top 10 Best Vampire Books Ever --www.scifinow.co.uk

About the Author

Praised for many works in the early 1800s, J. Sheridan LeFanu studied law at Trinity College in Dublin where he contributed to the Dublin University Newspaper by writing a series of short stories. It was this paper where he published his first ghost story "The Ghost and the Bone Settler" along with a collection of several others known as the Purcell Papers. These stories were within the realm of the gothic horror genre with depictions of archaic castles and terrifying themes of madness, suicide and encounters with undead phenomena. He would go on to became the owner of a newspapers himself, specifically the Warder and the Dublin Evening Mail. He would go on to write his first novels in historic fiction then soon after criminal biographies which was a very popular literary genre of that time as well.

Reviews

News