I’ve always had the perhaps unpopular literary opinion that Le Fanu’s Carmilla beats Stoker’s Dracula by a country mile, and it’s not just because I like to see women get what they want.
Written 25 years before Dracula, Carmilla is short, with an economy of language that makes the entire story feel like a single feverish dream. Both were written during an era of incredible social change and wrestled with ideas about modernity, class and social order, feminine sexual agency, and moral purity. The vampire in both Carmilla and Dracula embodies the perversion that threatens “goodness.” Both are also rooted in Victorian anxieties about cleanliness and contagion, the rising influence of the middle classes, the parasitism of the nobility class, and, more simply, intolerance of “the other.” Count Dracula is of a noble, ancient line, while Carmilla’s background is ambiguous but her uncanny magnetism and influence place her firmly in this position of an “other” who commands significant power.
Anyway (and this is all necessary background, I promise), where Le Fanu succeeds for me in a way Stoker doesn’t–besides that Stoker loved himself a dead horse for beating–is in the utter failure to make me fear Carmilla. She is not grotesque as Dracula often is for Stoker. And the moments of longing and eroticism in Carmilla are so compelling, so tender, that I surely would have been vampire food.
I mean, look at this:
“I have been in love with no one, and never shall," she whispered, "unless it should be with you."
How beautiful she looked in the moonlight!
Shy and strange was the look with which she quickly hid her face in my neck and hair, with tumultuous sighs, that seemed almost to sob, and pressed in mine a hand that trembled.
Her soft cheek was glowing against mine. "Darling, darling," she murmured, "I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so."
I started from her.
She was gazing on me with eyes from which all fire, all meaning had flown, and a face colorless and apathetic.
"Is there a chill in the air, dear?" she said drowsily. "I almost shiver; have I been dreaming? Let us come in. Come; come; come in.”
You’re swooning, right? You’re swooning. It’s an incredibly effective work and it doesn’t need 600 pages to be so.
Carmilla laid a foundation for much of the subsequent vampire fiction of the European canon, and the popularity has never stalled. Now, what I loved about Kat Dunn’s Hungerstone, was that it honored the original work while also subverting its narrative into a bloody celebration of good-for-her-style feminine sexual agency.
Lenore is a wife of ten years to a social-climbing steel magnate, Henry, but their marriage is stale and unsatisfying. They’ve just moved into the imposing Nethershaw manor in the English countryside, surrounded by wind-blown moors and a sense of looming dread.
When a carriage accident brings the mysterious Carmilla to stay in the manor, something begins to stir in Lenore.
So, it’s a Carmilla retelling, obviously, and it takes all of what is lovely about the original – the atmospheric sense of dread that drapes itself across the narrative like wine-red velvet, the bloodthirsty longing, the tender eroticism, but it also expands upon the idea of a woman’s hunger within a repressive context. Lenore’s personhood, womanhood, ability to experience pleasure, and agency are all tightly restricted, and Carmilla is the force that helps her to reacquaint herself with want. This hunger permeates the book, and it’s brutal, bloody, and so, so satisfying. This thematic exploration of desire is deepened through the parallel explorations of the appetites of the capitalist class, the industrial revolution, and colonial expansion. It's also subversive of the original narrative in that Carmilla's arrival is indeed a threat to the patriarchal status quo and to the carefully curated sterility of Lenore's life -- but this danger is ultimately imperative for Lenore's survival and liberation.
Two things I really appreciate: one, that this is not a story about Carmilla. She is an almost surface-level character, and little of her motivation or backstory is necessary for the story. Though what bites we get of her on-page are delicious (she’s sarcastic, strange, beautiful, and mean – consider me seduced! I’ve seen enough!), she is little else, ultimately, than a catalyst for Lenore. This is not a love story – at least, not one between the two women, though the development of their relationship has tension and tenderness enough to get by on. Lenore, on the other hand, is an expertly fleshed-out protagonist. She’s riddled with juxtapositions, complications, and short-comings. She is intelligent but fearful, self-repressed but full of rage, self-involved but self-aware. She is not good, she was never meant to be, and it’s for this reason that she’s so compelling.
Second, that the tone and pacing don’t recreate but implies the original novel’s sensory experience. Much of the first half of our story is a meandering through Lenore’s interior self, and it’s quiet, introspective, but never dull. The prose is lovely and elegant, and throughout the setting reverberates an anxious, eerie ticking of a clock, with the distinct impression that time is running out. In contrast, the final third of the story is a blood-drenched frenzy, though this sudden change of pace feels intuitively correct. It is like the death throes of a wounded animal; there is a heavy sense of inevitability, as though it is only right, only natural, that Lenore should rip control of her life back with her own bared teeth, that things should erupt from everywhere and nowhere, all at once.
