Carmilla

A classic Victorian vampire novella, which influenced Bram Stoker's later treatment of the vampire mythos in Dracula.
About J. Sheridan Le Fanu :
Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (28 August 1814 - 7 February 1873) was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels. He was the leading ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century and was central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era. M.R. James described Le Fanu as "absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories". Three of his best-known works are Uncle Silas, Carmilla and The House by the Churchyard.
" In many ways the antithesis of Dracula, and if Stoker's novel disappointed me with its clean-cut, heterosexual male-influenced dichotomies, than le Fanu's novella is the flipside of the coin: female-centric, homoerotic, ambiguous and enigmatic (and all in about a quarter of the length!). Here the vampire is not the withered, evil "Other" but the beautiful, sensuous stranger that is readily welcomed into home and heart, becoming the double for the protagonist, leading to a very different sense of horror--the necessary destruction not of an enemy but a loved one, perhaps even the self. It's a really eerie, beguiling little novella, uncanny in a way that Dracula only is in brief flashes... "
" Aren't the books that we like the most, the harder to review?Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu became one of my favourite book of all time, it spoke to my soul through words of darkness, each sentence was like sweet melancholic music echoing and engraving in me.
Sentences like "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." will never leave me be anymore.It was short and like some classics the end was a bit rushed but the away it was written compensates every bit of hastiness on get in to the end.Read it for the poetry on the words, when it comes to authors like Le Fanu, you have to see the writing as the experience, more even that the plot itself. Read it in a languish way,absorbing the luxurious sentences and get lost on the beauty of it. "