#thevampyre — Public Fediverse posts

Old Blood, Still Warm: On John Polidori’s The Vampyre and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla

There are books I associate with a season so completely that reading them outside it feels almost indecent. October belongs to horror, to Gothic fiction. My Penguin Speculative Fiction Special containing John Polidori’s The Vampyre and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla had been sitting on my shelves since I bought it at Fully Booked last year, and this seemed the proper month to take it down again. I have decided, rather arbitrarily but with conviction, that until November I shall read (and reread) horror: Poe, Lovecraft, Stoker, Anne Rice, Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson, Adam Nevill, Stephen King. A month of bad houses, old graves, and people who should know better than to investigate noises after midnight.

I had read The Vampyre ages ago. Encountering Polidori again as an adult was strangely humbling because I still struggled with him. The prose has that Gothic-Romantic density in which a sentence sometimes seems to have wandered in from another century wearing a black coat and refusing to explain itself. More than once I had to recite passages aloud, slowly, simply to hear where the thought was going. Oddly, this made me enjoy the language more. I take pleasure in prose that resists being skimmed. Modern reading trains the eye to consume; Polidori occasionally forces the mouth to participate.

The story itself is skeletal by later standards. Aubrey, a wealthy young Englishman, becomes fascinated by the mysterious Lord Ruthven, an aristocrat whose cold presence brings ruin wherever he goes. They travel together until Aubrey, repelled by Ruthven, leaves him. In Greece, Aubrey falls in love with Ianthe, who tells him tales of vampires, and soon she is murdered. Ruthven later reappears, is apparently killed by bandits, and extracts an oath from Aubrey that his death will remain secret for a year and a day. Then Ruthven turns up alive in London and courts Aubrey’s sister. Bound by his promise and increasingly thought mad, Aubrey can do almost nothing. The machinery is crude in places, the characters thin, the ending brutally abrupt. Yet the idea has teeth.

What fascinates me now is the kind of vampire Polidori created. Ruthven is not a rotting peasant corpse crawling out of folkloric soil. He is an aristocrat. He enters drawing rooms. He possesses money, breeding, composure, sexual magnetism. Predation has learned manners. The vampire becomes social rather than merely supernatural. Ruthven feeds upon trust before he feeds upon blood. Evil has discovered that elegance is excellent camouflage.

Behind this small story stands one of literary history’s absurdly productive evenings. At Lake Geneva in 1816, Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and Byron’s young physician John Polidori entertained themselves with ghost stories during that famously dismal summer. Byron proposed that each attempt one. Mary’s nightmare grew into Frankenstein. Byron produced a vampire fragment. Polidori took the germ of that idea and made something of his own from it, creating Lord Ruthven, whose aristocratic menace was unmistakably “Byronic.” When The Vampyre appeared in 1819, it was initially tangled up with Byron’s name, an irony almost too perfect: the literary vampire was born partly from the glamour of a living celebrity who already seemed to society half damned.

Then there is Carmilla, altogether richer to me, and far more enduring as fiction. I have read it several times, most recently last year. I know its movements almost by heart: Laura’s isolated life in a Styrian castle, the strange carriage accident, the arrival of the languid Carmilla, their growing intimacy, Laura’s weakening health, the portrait of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, and the recognition that the beloved guest and the ancient dead woman are the same creature. None of this can surprise me anymore. It does not need to.

That may be the clearest sign that a Gothic story has survived its own plot. Once the scare is gone, atmosphere remains. Le Fanu’s prose is more supple than Polidori’s, and Laura’s retrospective narration gives the story the texture of a memory that was never successfully buried. Carmilla loves Laura, or claims to, and the story refuses to make that love simple. Her tenderness has possession inside it. Her erotic language can sound devotional and then suddenly annihilating. Laura is repelled and attracted, frightened yet fascinated. Le Fanu understood that intimacy can be terrifying because it dissolves boundaries. To be loved completely can carry a fantasy of being consumed completely. Vampire fiction makes that metaphor embarrassingly literal.

Published twenty-five years before Dracula, Carmilla already contains much of the later vampire grammar, but its peculiar power belongs to its ambiguity. There is something sad about Carmilla that adaptations often descend into lesbian-vampire spectacle. She is monstrous, certainly, but she is also old, repetitive, trapped in appetite. Immortality has not enlarged her existence. She performs the same seduction, the same feeding, the same return to the grave. The vampire promises escape from death and delivers another kind of prison. Perhaps that is why old vampire fiction interests me more than stories in which immortality becomes a glamorous superpower. Eternal life ought to be psychologically expensive.

Le Fanu and Bram Stoker were among my introductions to this world when I was a teenager, back when I was a Goth and took the whole aesthetic with suitable seriousness: the literature, the music, the clothes, the delicious morbidity of it all. I can smile at that former version of me without disowning it. Taste changes, but some early fascinations sink deeper than taste. I still love old castles, doomed aristocrats, candlelit corridors, decaying families, impossible women returning from the dead, the Byronic anti-hero. Apparently some things survive adolescence.

Reading Polidori and Le Fanu together made me think about how much vampire fiction has changed while its central anxiety has remained stable. The vampire is death with personality. It speaks. It courts. It asks to be invited closer. Perhaps that is why I keep returning to these stories. Death in ordinary life is mute and impersonal. Gothic fiction gives it a face beautiful enough to look at, then makes the mistake of letting it smile.

Old Blood, Still Warm: On John Polidori’s The Vampyre and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla

There are books I associate with a season so completely that reading them outside it feels almost indecent. October belongs to horror, to Gothic fiction. My Penguin Speculative Fiction Special containing John Polidori’s The Vampyre and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla had been sitting on my shelves since I bought it at Fully Booked last year, and this seemed the proper month to take it down again. I have decided, rather arbitrarily but with conviction, that until November I shall read (and reread) horror: Poe, Lovecraft, Stoker, Anne Rice, Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson, Adam Nevill, Stephen King. A month of bad houses, old graves, and people who should know better than to investigate noises after midnight.

I had read The Vampyre ages ago. Encountering Polidori again as an adult was strangely humbling because I still struggled with him. The prose has that Gothic-Romantic density in which a sentence sometimes seems to have wandered in from another century wearing a black coat and refusing to explain itself. More than once I had to recite passages aloud, slowly, simply to hear where the thought was going. Oddly, this made me enjoy the language more. I take pleasure in prose that resists being skimmed. Modern reading trains the eye to consume; Polidori occasionally forces the mouth to participate.

The story itself is skeletal by later standards. Aubrey, a wealthy young Englishman, becomes fascinated by the mysterious Lord Ruthven, an aristocrat whose cold presence brings ruin wherever he goes. They travel together until Aubrey, repelled by Ruthven, leaves him. In Greece, Aubrey falls in love with Ianthe, who tells him tales of vampires, and soon she is murdered. Ruthven later reappears, is apparently killed by bandits, and extracts an oath from Aubrey that his death will remain secret for a year and a day. Then Ruthven turns up alive in London and courts Aubrey’s sister. Bound by his promise and increasingly thought mad, Aubrey can do almost nothing. The machinery is crude in places, the characters thin, the ending brutally abrupt. Yet the idea has teeth.

What fascinates me now is the kind of vampire Polidori created. Ruthven is not a rotting peasant corpse crawling out of folkloric soil. He is an aristocrat. He enters drawing rooms. He possesses money, breeding, composure, sexual magnetism. Predation has learned manners. The vampire becomes social rather than merely supernatural. Ruthven feeds upon trust before he feeds upon blood. Evil has discovered that elegance is excellent camouflage.

Behind this small story stands one of literary history’s absurdly productive evenings. At Lake Geneva in 1816, Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and Byron’s young physician John Polidori entertained themselves with ghost stories during that famously dismal summer. Byron proposed that each attempt one. Mary’s nightmare grew into Frankenstein. Byron produced a vampire fragment. Polidori took the germ of that idea and made something of his own from it, creating Lord Ruthven, whose aristocratic menace was unmistakably “Byronic.” When The Vampyre appeared in 1819, it was initially tangled up with Byron’s name, an irony almost too perfect: the literary vampire was born partly from the glamour of a living celebrity who already seemed to society half damned.

Then there is Carmilla, altogether richer to me, and far more enduring as fiction. I have read it several times, most recently last year. I know its movements almost by heart: Laura’s isolated life in a Styrian castle, the strange carriage accident, the arrival of the languid Carmilla, their growing intimacy, Laura’s weakening health, the portrait of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, and the recognition that the beloved guest and the ancient dead woman are the same creature. None of this can surprise me anymore. It does not need to.

That may be the clearest sign that a Gothic story has survived its own plot. Once the scare is gone, atmosphere remains. Le Fanu’s prose is more supple than Polidori’s, and Laura’s retrospective narration gives the story the texture of a memory that was never successfully buried. Carmilla loves Laura, or claims to, and the story refuses to make that love simple. Her tenderness has possession inside it. Her erotic language can sound devotional and then suddenly annihilating. Laura is repelled and attracted, frightened yet fascinated. Le Fanu understood that intimacy can be terrifying because it dissolves boundaries. To be loved completely can carry a fantasy of being consumed completely. Vampire fiction makes that metaphor embarrassingly literal.

Published twenty-five years before Dracula, Carmilla already contains much of the later vampire grammar, but its peculiar power belongs to its ambiguity. There is something sad about Carmilla that adaptations often descend into lesbian-vampire spectacle. She is monstrous, certainly, but she is also old, repetitive, trapped in appetite. Immortality has not enlarged her existence. She performs the same seduction, the same feeding, the same return to the grave. The vampire promises escape from death and delivers another kind of prison. Perhaps that is why old vampire fiction interests me more than stories in which immortality becomes a glamorous superpower. Eternal life ought to be psychologically expensive.

Le Fanu and Bram Stoker were among my introductions to this world when I was a teenager, back when I was a Goth and took the whole aesthetic with suitable seriousness: the literature, the music, the clothes, the delicious morbidity of it all. I can smile at that former version of me without disowning it. Taste changes, but some early fascinations sink deeper than taste. I still love old castles, doomed aristocrats, candlelit corridors, decaying families, impossible women returning from the dead, the Byronic anti-hero. Apparently some things survive adolescence.

Reading Polidori and Le Fanu together made me think about how much vampire fiction has changed while its central anxiety has remained stable. The vampire is death with personality. It speaks. It courts. It asks to be invited closer. Perhaps that is why I keep returning to these stories. Death in ordinary life is mute and impersonal. Gothic fiction gives it a face beautiful enough to look at, then makes the mistake of letting it smile.

Old Blood, Still Warm: On John Polidori’s The Vampyre and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla

There are books I associate with a season so completely that reading them outside it feels almost indecent. October belongs to horror, to Gothic fiction. My Penguin Speculative Fiction Special containing John Polidori’s The Vampyre and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla had been sitting on my shelves since I bought it at Fully Booked last year, and this seemed the proper month to take it down again. I have decided, rather arbitrarily but with conviction, that until November I shall read (and reread) horror: Poe, Lovecraft, Stoker, Anne Rice, Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson, Adam Nevill, Stephen King. A month of bad houses, old graves, and people who should know better than to investigate noises after midnight.

I had read The Vampyre ages ago. Encountering Polidori again as an adult was strangely humbling because I still struggled with him. The prose has that Gothic-Romantic density in which a sentence sometimes seems to have wandered in from another century wearing a black coat and refusing to explain itself. More than once I had to recite passages aloud, slowly, simply to hear where the thought was going. Oddly, this made me enjoy the language more. I take pleasure in prose that resists being skimmed. Modern reading trains the eye to consume; Polidori occasionally forces the mouth to participate.

The story itself is skeletal by later standards. Aubrey, a wealthy young Englishman, becomes fascinated by the mysterious Lord Ruthven, an aristocrat whose cold presence brings ruin wherever he goes. They travel together until Aubrey, repelled by Ruthven, leaves him. In Greece, Aubrey falls in love with Ianthe, who tells him tales of vampires, and soon she is murdered. Ruthven later reappears, is apparently killed by bandits, and extracts an oath from Aubrey that his death will remain secret for a year and a day. Then Ruthven turns up alive in London and courts Aubrey’s sister. Bound by his promise and increasingly thought mad, Aubrey can do almost nothing. The machinery is crude in places, the characters thin, the ending brutally abrupt. Yet the idea has teeth.

What fascinates me now is the kind of vampire Polidori created. Ruthven is not a rotting peasant corpse crawling out of folkloric soil. He is an aristocrat. He enters drawing rooms. He possesses money, breeding, composure, sexual magnetism. Predation has learned manners. The vampire becomes social rather than merely supernatural. Ruthven feeds upon trust before he feeds upon blood. Evil has discovered that elegance is excellent camouflage.

Behind this small story stands one of literary history’s absurdly productive evenings. At Lake Geneva in 1816, Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and Byron’s young physician John Polidori entertained themselves with ghost stories during that famously dismal summer. Byron proposed that each attempt one. Mary’s nightmare grew into Frankenstein. Byron produced a vampire fragment. Polidori took the germ of that idea and made something of his own from it, creating Lord Ruthven, whose aristocratic menace was unmistakably “Byronic.” When The Vampyre appeared in 1819, it was initially tangled up with Byron’s name, an irony almost too perfect: the literary vampire was born partly from the glamour of a living celebrity who already seemed to society half damned.

Then there is Carmilla, altogether richer to me, and far more enduring as fiction. I have read it several times, most recently last year. I know its movements almost by heart: Laura’s isolated life in a Styrian castle, the strange carriage accident, the arrival of the languid Carmilla, their growing intimacy, Laura’s weakening health, the portrait of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, and the recognition that the beloved guest and the ancient dead woman are the same creature. None of this can surprise me anymore. It does not need to.

That may be the clearest sign that a Gothic story has survived its own plot. Once the scare is gone, atmosphere remains. Le Fanu’s prose is more supple than Polidori’s, and Laura’s retrospective narration gives the story the texture of a memory that was never successfully buried. Carmilla loves Laura, or claims to, and the story refuses to make that love simple. Her tenderness has possession inside it. Her erotic language can sound devotional and then suddenly annihilating. Laura is repelled and attracted, frightened yet fascinated. Le Fanu understood that intimacy can be terrifying because it dissolves boundaries. To be loved completely can carry a fantasy of being consumed completely. Vampire fiction makes that metaphor embarrassingly literal.

Published twenty-five years before Dracula, Carmilla already contains much of the later vampire grammar, but its peculiar power belongs to its ambiguity. There is something sad about Carmilla that adaptations often descend into lesbian-vampire spectacle. She is monstrous, certainly, but she is also old, repetitive, trapped in appetite. Immortality has not enlarged her existence. She performs the same seduction, the same feeding, the same return to the grave. The vampire promises escape from death and delivers another kind of prison. Perhaps that is why old vampire fiction interests me more than stories in which immortality becomes a glamorous superpower. Eternal life ought to be psychologically expensive.

Le Fanu and Bram Stoker were among my introductions to this world when I was a teenager, back when I was a Goth and took the whole aesthetic with suitable seriousness: the literature, the music, the clothes, the delicious morbidity of it all. I can smile at that former version of me without disowning it. Taste changes, but some early fascinations sink deeper than taste. I still love old castles, doomed aristocrats, candlelit corridors, decaying families, impossible women returning from the dead, the Byronic anti-hero. Apparently some things survive adolescence.

Reading Polidori and Le Fanu together made me think about how much vampire fiction has changed while its central anxiety has remained stable. The vampire is death with personality. It speaks. It courts. It asks to be invited closer. Perhaps that is why I keep returning to these stories. Death in ordinary life is mute and impersonal. Gothic fiction gives it a face beautiful enough to look at, then makes the mistake of letting it smile.

Old Blood, Still Warm: On John Polidori’s The Vampyre and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla

There are books I associate with a season so completely that reading them outside it feels almost indecent. October belongs to horror, to Gothic fiction. My Penguin Speculative Fiction Special containing John Polidori’s The Vampyre and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla had been sitting on my shelves since I bought it at Fully Booked last year, and this seemed the proper month to take it down again. I have decided, rather arbitrarily but with conviction, that until November I shall read (and reread) horror: Poe, Lovecraft, Stoker, Anne Rice, Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson, Adam Nevill, Stephen King. A month of bad houses, old graves, and people who should know better than to investigate noises after midnight.

I had read The Vampyre ages ago. Encountering Polidori again as an adult was strangely humbling because I still struggled with him. The prose has that Gothic-Romantic density in which a sentence sometimes seems to have wandered in from another century wearing a black coat and refusing to explain itself. More than once I had to recite passages aloud, slowly, simply to hear where the thought was going. Oddly, this made me enjoy the language more. I take pleasure in prose that resists being skimmed. Modern reading trains the eye to consume; Polidori occasionally forces the mouth to participate.

The story itself is skeletal by later standards. Aubrey, a wealthy young Englishman, becomes fascinated by the mysterious Lord Ruthven, an aristocrat whose cold presence brings ruin wherever he goes. They travel together until Aubrey, repelled by Ruthven, leaves him. In Greece, Aubrey falls in love with Ianthe, who tells him tales of vampires, and soon she is murdered. Ruthven later reappears, is apparently killed by bandits, and extracts an oath from Aubrey that his death will remain secret for a year and a day. Then Ruthven turns up alive in London and courts Aubrey’s sister. Bound by his promise and increasingly thought mad, Aubrey can do almost nothing. The machinery is crude in places, the characters thin, the ending brutally abrupt. Yet the idea has teeth.

What fascinates me now is the kind of vampire Polidori created. Ruthven is not a rotting peasant corpse crawling out of folkloric soil. He is an aristocrat. He enters drawing rooms. He possesses money, breeding, composure, sexual magnetism. Predation has learned manners. The vampire becomes social rather than merely supernatural. Ruthven feeds upon trust before he feeds upon blood. Evil has discovered that elegance is excellent camouflage.

Behind this small story stands one of literary history’s absurdly productive evenings. At Lake Geneva in 1816, Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and Byron’s young physician John Polidori entertained themselves with ghost stories during that famously dismal summer. Byron proposed that each attempt one. Mary’s nightmare grew into Frankenstein. Byron produced a vampire fragment. Polidori took the germ of that idea and made something of his own from it, creating Lord Ruthven, whose aristocratic menace was unmistakably “Byronic.” When The Vampyre appeared in 1819, it was initially tangled up with Byron’s name, an irony almost too perfect: the literary vampire was born partly from the glamour of a living celebrity who already seemed to society half damned.

Then there is Carmilla, altogether richer to me, and far more enduring as fiction. I have read it several times, most recently last year. I know its movements almost by heart: Laura’s isolated life in a Styrian castle, the strange carriage accident, the arrival of the languid Carmilla, their growing intimacy, Laura’s weakening health, the portrait of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, and the recognition that the beloved guest and the ancient dead woman are the same creature. None of this can surprise me anymore. It does not need to.

That may be the clearest sign that a Gothic story has survived its own plot. Once the scare is gone, atmosphere remains. Le Fanu’s prose is more supple than Polidori’s, and Laura’s retrospective narration gives the story the texture of a memory that was never successfully buried. Carmilla loves Laura, or claims to, and the story refuses to make that love simple. Her tenderness has possession inside it. Her erotic language can sound devotional and then suddenly annihilating. Laura is repelled and attracted, frightened yet fascinated. Le Fanu understood that intimacy can be terrifying because it dissolves boundaries. To be loved completely can carry a fantasy of being consumed completely. Vampire fiction makes that metaphor embarrassingly literal.

Published twenty-five years before Dracula, Carmilla already contains much of the later vampire grammar, but its peculiar power belongs to its ambiguity. There is something sad about Carmilla that adaptations often descend into lesbian-vampire spectacle. She is monstrous, certainly, but she is also old, repetitive, trapped in appetite. Immortality has not enlarged her existence. She performs the same seduction, the same feeding, the same return to the grave. The vampire promises escape from death and delivers another kind of prison. Perhaps that is why old vampire fiction interests me more than stories in which immortality becomes a glamorous superpower. Eternal life ought to be psychologically expensive.

Le Fanu and Bram Stoker were among my introductions to this world when I was a teenager, back when I was a Goth and took the whole aesthetic with suitable seriousness: the literature, the music, the clothes, the delicious morbidity of it all. I can smile at that former version of me without disowning it. Taste changes, but some early fascinations sink deeper than taste. I still love old castles, doomed aristocrats, candlelit corridors, decaying families, impossible women returning from the dead, the Byronic anti-hero. Apparently some things survive adolescence.

Reading Polidori and Le Fanu together made me think about how much vampire fiction has changed while its central anxiety has remained stable. The vampire is death with personality. It speaks. It courts. It asks to be invited closer. Perhaps that is why I keep returning to these stories. Death in ordinary life is mute and impersonal. Gothic fiction gives it a face beautiful enough to look at, then makes the mistake of letting it smile.