Carmilla And Other Pleasing Terrors

‘Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, and longer and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat, but there the caress fixed itself. My heart beat faster, my breathing rose and fell rapidly and full drawn; a sobbing, that rose into a sense of strangulation, supervened, and turned into a dreadful convulsion, in which my senses left me and I became unconscious…’ Before Dracula there was Carmilla, the queen of the sapphic vampires, created by the Irish author J.S. Le Fanu. Carmilla (1872) is a landmark in vampire fiction, the character portrayed in numerous horror films, most notably Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers. The similarities between Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) are striking, with Le Fanu’s Baron Vordenburg anticipating Stoker’s Van Helsing, while Carmilla is another undead sexually magnetic aristocrat posing as a descendant of herself. Le Fanu was a Victorian master of gothic, mystery, and supernatural fiction, and the father of the modern ghost story. As M.R. James wrote of him, ‘I do not think that there are better ghost stories anywhere than the best of Le Fanu’s.’ This collection brings together Le Fanu’s greatest short stories, full of horror, intrigue, Irish folklore, and gallows humour, all building towards his masterpiece, Carmilla, the chilling tale of a beautiful girl who came to stay… There are also explanatory notes, original publication details, suggested reading, an original introduction, and an essay on Le Fanu by his admirer and natural heir, M.R. James.