Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1872) Review: 2/5 “It’s not Dracula, but a fine little horror story”

Published in 1872, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, an Irish writer, set out to tell a small Gothic horror tale of a father and daughter, who’s being pursued by a vampire who is harassing his daughter. Like every horror story, the father is also seeing his daughter standing mysteriously over the bed with blood down the middle of her gown. It’s almost haunting to think about. While the father, in his own right, isn’t trying to overreact, he keeps seeing Carmilla at the foot of the bed. The problem is she locks the door from the inside, and somehow Le Fanu breathes lines into his prose that read: “Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime, there are grubs and larvae, don’t you see—each with their peculiar propensities, necessities, and structure.”^[1] Spoken by the family doctor, as if this was really going to stop Carmilla from being entranced by the strange creature.