Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Carmilla

Everyone has read, or at least knows, the famous "Dracula" by Bram Stoker, whose fame was significantly amplified by the eponymous film by Francis Ford Coppola in 1992, but unfortunately, few people know the novel that is the most direct predecessor to "Dracula", so much so that it pushed Stoker to delay the publication of his bestseller until 1897 for fear of even a plagiarism accusation.

Indeed, from "Carmilla," the Irishman Stoker took many ideas (for example, the character of Dr. Van Helsing, of which here we have the prototype sketched in the mysterious baron Vordenburg), reworking them, as one does, in a new guise that would have much more success than that of his compatriot Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Nevertheless, "Carmilla" remains to this day one of the most splendid examples of 19th-century Gothic literature, creating an ambiguous character with very particular traits that would influence even recent years' music (see the earliest albums of Cradle Of Filth, to cite just one example) and cinema (evident references and true quotes are found in "Alucarda," a 1978 cult horror by Mexican director Juan Lopez Moctezuma), not to mention literature.

The novel, published way back in 1872, tells the story of the encounter between the young Laura, daughter of a retired English officer who owns an ancient castle in Austrian Styria, with the beautiful, mysterious, and intriguing Carmilla, a young woman with an origin jealously hidden and ambiguous behavior, so much so that the friendship that develops between the two soon takes on shades on the verge of sapphic, a platonic sapphic that assumes increasingly sanguine connotations, until the macabre final discovery and the epilogue that reveals every terrible secret.

The work is easy to read, besides being relatively short (compared to its illustrious follower), but beyond that, "Carmilla" fully develops the still too immature proposal of "The Vampyre" by John William Polidori (1819, the true progenitor of the vampire novel, somewhat like Horace Walpole's work had given rise to the Gothic literary movement), in a crescendo of shocking revelations without ever falling into the banal or exaggerated, and above all evoking an absolutely unique atmosphere that even Stoker would not have been able to duplicate: the reader will be torn from their world and catapulted among the dark mountains of Styria, whose mist-cloaked woods conceal ruins of abandoned villages, vestiges of a terrible and extinct nobility, a world of horror hidden behind the eyes of a seemingly defenseless girl, sweet and languid as only a panther playing with its dying prey can be.

With "Carmilla," Le Fanu produces, beyond his personal masterpiece, a fundamental contribution to the evolution of supernatural and horrific narrative, which in twenty years would be revolutionized by the innovative ideas of writers like the Welsh Machen, more heavily influenced by the new literary culture of decadence. But the Irishman's work is one of the highest points of the Gothic-Romantic genre (and also one of the last), a novel that defines and finally establishes the vampire figure, consecrating it among the most successful creations of 19th-century Horror, also anticipating the figure of the femme fatale that would be so dear to fin de siècle artists.

Do not delay any further in reading this novel, if you are passionate about the genre, because "Carmilla" is, without fear of falling into rhetoric, an essential work, which will know how to provide you with emotions as only true masterpieces can.