Carmilla - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Her lusciousness
Is dust, but does Carmilla’s
Light step haunt the stair?
Predating Dracula by a good twenty years, Carmilla is a vampire novella with a titular vamp and a fine line in stifled, bosom heaving Victorian eroticism. It's also a much better novel than its more famous successor (which is being microblogged tomorrow), evoking the quasi-erotic relationship between vampire and victim through prose that is neither lumpen nor leaden.
It's also an entertaining read if you like stories about attractive women in big skirts basically lezzing off with one another. For an insight into the 'horrific' power of deviant sexual attraction, there are few better places to go than a Victorian ghost story. All that (menstrual?) blood, white flesh and swooning - it's Freud's theory of sublimation in action. And a whole lot of Jung's anima/animus theory too, if you can be bothered unpicking that.
Le Fanu was an enormously successful writer of high-class schlocky fiction in his day (a bit of a Stephen King). Quite why he's faded into comparative obscurity while Stoker's yawnfest, Dracula, has become an unchallenged classic is beyond me, but that's luck for you.
And just because we couldn't resist it, here's Grace Jones vamping it up as an, erm, vampire (or should that be camp-ire?)
No comments:
Post a Comment