LGBT Senior Subscriber Freebie: The Vivid Press Edition of Vampire Classic ‘Carmilla’
Before There Was Dracula, There Was Carmilla
A Gothic masterpiece — and it’s yours free.
Most people know the name Dracula. Far fewer know the name Carmilla — and that’s a shame, because Carmilla came first.
Published in 1872, more than two decades before Bram Stoker’s famous count ever set foot on English soil, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla introduced the world to the vampire as a figure of seduction, obsession, and dread. It was groundbreaking then. It remains essential now. And it has a particular resonance for LGBTQ readers that no other vampire story quite matches.
We’re delighted to offer LGBTSr subscriber the Vivid Press Edition of Carmilla, both the ebook and audiobook editions. Beautifully produced with an original introduction written exclusively for this edition, this is complimentary for you, our readers. Current subscribers will receive in this week’s newsletter. Not signed up yet? HERE’S YOUR CHANCE.
What (and Who) Is Carmilla?
Carmilla is the story of Laura, a young woman living in an isolated castle in the Styrian countryside of Austria with her widowed father. Her life is quiet, somewhat lonely, and largely uneventful — until a carriage accident outside their gates leaves a mysterious young woman in their care.
Her name is Carmilla. She is beautiful, languid, and deeply strange. She sleeps until noon. She refuses to speak of her family or her past. She attaches herself to Laura with an intensity that is by turns tender, unsettling, and overwhelming. Laura finds herself drawn to Carmilla in ways she cannot explain and cannot resist — even as she begins waking in the night from terrible dreams, even as her health begins to decline, even as rumors reach them of a plague moving through the surrounding villages, draining young women of their lives.
What Laura does not yet know — what the reader understands long before she does — is that Carmilla is not what she appears to be. She is something far older, something that has worn many names over many centuries, something that feeds on the young women she claims to love.
The horror of Carmilla is not the horror of sudden violence or monstrous appearance. It is the horror of intimacy itself — of not knowing whether the person closest to you is destroying you, and of not being entirely sure, even as you suspect the truth, that you want it to stop.
Its Historical Significance
Le Fanu wrote Carmilla at a time when the love between Laura and her mysterious guest could never be named directly. And yet there it is, on every page — unmistakable, electric, and treated with a seriousness and complexity that was radical for its era and remains moving today. This is not a story that uses queerness as a cheap shock or a symbol of evil. It is a story about desire and vulnerability and the particular danger of loving someone who may not be entirely human in their capacity for care.
For LGBTQ readers, Carmilla has always felt like ours in a way that mainstream Gothic fiction rarely does. It predates the modern language of queer identity, but not the feeling — and that feeling comes through on every page.
The Vivid Press Edition includes an original introduction that places the novella in its historical context, explores its enduring influence on vampire fiction and LGBTQ literature, and illuminates what makes it as haunting today as it was when Le Fanu first published it.
Carmilla is short enough to read or listen to in a single sitting and rich enough to stay with you for years. We think you’ll love it.