an unexpectedly thought-provoking halloween read

Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime they are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure."

This year, for the first time since I was in elementary school, I wanted to read something "spooky" during the fall. But I didn't feel emotionally up to the task of reading a full-fledged horror novel, so I instead picked up this little 1872 vampire story. It was just the right amount of creepy, with a surprising amount of depth: a melancholy contemplation of how society regards girlhood, with overtones of unease about humanity's position in the world. To a modern reader, the major plot "twist" is unsurprising, but there is a certain enjoyment in imagining what it was like to read this when it was first published - over two decades before Dracula, when the vampire genre was less ubiquitous. The writing remains engrossing and often quietly horrifying, my favorite chilling scene being one that seems to describe sleep paralysis. Even if you've read other vampire books, as most of us have, there are still surprises to be seen in the way this story unfolds.

What I found fascinating about the eponymous vampire is how seamlessly she fits into the world around her, as though she's a puzzle piece that was bound to materialize, or an organism that evolved to occupy a niche in an ecosystem. Repeatedly, we see how men assess and value female characters based on their appearance. Thus, Carmilla's beauty speeds her acceptance into people's homes. We see girls living in sheltered idleness, lonely without good friends their age, and often without mothers - a vacuum where matriarchy would have been. As a result they're overjoyed, perhaps a little blindly, at the opportunity of having a female companion. Given that Carmilla is a carnivore who has to feed off humans, is it any surprise that she learned to take advantage of these situations? We watch as she participates in a masquerade ball, playing the part assigned to her while subverting the whole ritual to achieve her own ends.

One of the most affecting and (initially) cryptic passages is when Carmilla argues for her right to exist as a natural creature. These arguments fall on the uncomprehending ears of other characters: "All things proceed from Nature, don't they? All things in the heaven, in the earth, and under the earth, act and live as Nature ordains? I think so."

On the subject of nature, I happened to be reading this at the same time as Jane Goodall's Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe, which is all about another type of near-human creature. Both books explore the discomfort that people can experience upon seeing that humanity might not be as separate or supreme as they thought. Evolution was an idea that was still relatively new at the time that Carmilla was written, and debates between scientific and religious explanations appear a few times in the story.

What makes this book so sad and mysterious, and so hard to stop thinking about, is that Carmilla never really feels like a villain. Even when we learn the truth about what she's done, it is hard to feel vengeful towards her. Over the course of the story she's appeared to be both affectionate and selfish, young and ancient, fragile and dangerous. It's mesmerizing, and it's hard not to share her would-be victims' desire to have her around for longer.

PS, this book can be acquired for free at Project Gutenberg, and I just learend that an audiobook version featuring David Tennant came out a few days ago. :)


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