In the Library
Carmilla
Sheridan Le Fanu, 1872
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 2 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 17
- Length
- Length 28k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die—die, sweetly die—into mine.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
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Bram Stoker
Dracula does the same thing, but turns one victim's private ordeal into a global battle, complete with the male hunters Carmilla's world never gets to send after her.
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The Fall of the House of Usher
Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher does the same thing, but buries its dying bloodline's secret in a single collapsing house instead of a whole feudal forest.
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The Turn of the Screw
Henry James
The Turn of the Screw does the same thing, but leaves its governess alone to decide whether the danger in the house is real or her own invention.
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About the book
A picture comes up from the lumber room of a Styrian schloss, cleaned and revarnished, dated 1698: Mircalla, Countess Karnstein. It is the face of the girl asleep down the corridor, the beautiful guest left behind by a carriage accident, who never rises before one o'clock and will not say where she comes from. Laura loves her, and is frightened of her, and cannot tell the two feelings apart. Le Fanu put the vampire on the page a quarter of a century before Dracula, and did the thing Stoker never dared: the horror here is tenderness. Carmilla presses her cheek to Laura's, calls her darling, tells her they will be one forever, and the wasting that follows arrives disguised as devotion. Laura tells all this long afterwards, safe, and still she listens at the drawing room door for a light step she would know anywhere.