Cornellbooksellers.com

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

I’ve spent some time now staring at my screen wondering what to rate this book. The four stars I’ve given it seem excessive for a book this slight, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Does Goodreads require a new system with half-stars or am I getting hopelessly pedantic about something I’m not getting paid to do? (The correct answer is: “yes” to both.)

Star ratings aside, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla is worth reading for anyone with even a passing interest in vampires or Victorian Goth. Published 25 years prior to Stoker’s masterpiece, to call Carmilla an influence is an understatement. Stoker lifted elements of Carmilla wholesale: Central European castles & ruins, a menacing coachman, a man of action a victim’s relative and an eccentric old expert banning together to finish off the beast—and more. Carmilla is also presented as the notes of a Doctor who is an expert in the occult, but these kinds of framing devices were common to many Victorian gothics.

And here’s the point where I wish I had more expertise in Victorian lit. Some of the elements of Carmilla—particularly the use of multiple, jarringly easy anagrams along the lines of “Alucard” from a hokey Universal monster pic—throw the modern reader (by which I guess I mean me) right out of the flow of the narrative. The anagrams almost seem like satire now—Monty Python-esque. Was Le Fanu poking a little fun at the concept of the gothic story? I tend to favour that interpretation because the climatic scenes of true horror in the story are well written, but almost perfunctory. Le Fanu lavishes much more time on the scenes of (largely suggested but visceral) lesbianism and doomed affection between the young female leads. These scenes are so atmospheric and effective—sensual, yet creepy—that they become the whole raison d’être of the book.

Stoker lifted a number of story components from Carmilla, but was more interested in the horrific elements of the vampire mythos. Don’t get me wrong, I love Dracula, but, in part, Carmilla seems more contemporary in its lush romanticism. Le Fanu understood the appeal of the sexy, doomed “children-of-the-night” in a more direct way than Stoker. Most of Carmilla wouldn’t be too out of place in a contemporary anthology of urban fantasy or vampire-romance stories; except that Le Fanu’s atmospherics are more resonant than any dozen vampire-lit toss-offs on the shelves today.

View all my reviews

The Strain by Guillermo del Toro
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Wholly unoriginal, but such a deft pastiche of various sources—Dracula, Salem’s Lot, Del Toro’s own Blade II and others—that The Strain stands out in the crowded vampire-book market. The prose is a little clunky in spots, which I suspect has to do with the duel authors involved. Certain passages bear the unmistakable flavour of Del Toro’s lyricism—best represented in Pan’s Labyrinth—while others are standard jargon and slang-filled pedestrian thriller-speak (which I have to assume are the work of Chuck Hogan). Here’s the thing though: these opposing styles mesh (awkwardly at first) into a highly entertaining whole. The ancient-seeming vampiric supernatural myth forced into a very twenty-first century framework of terrorism, contagion and post-9/11 paranoid conspiracy. One of the aspects of the book that really worked for me was simply spotting all of Del Toro’s pet obsessions: folk tales and oral history, children in peril, dark underground spaces (and specifically subways), disease and transformation, autopsies, blue collar and white-collar heroes finding common ground, secretive assassins/strike teams and baroque weapons. All of these elements can be found in Del Toro’s movies—from Mimic to Hellboy II—and all feature prominently in The Strain. For me, a true auteur or artist is revealed through his or her obsessive revisiting of themes and motifs. I thoroughly enjoy following Del Toro’s process of working out how and why these things obsess him—whether in movies or on the page.

View all my reviews