Spoiler free post but I’m 60 pages in and probably gonna DNF even though that’s the halfway point.
Everyone was hyping this book up so hard because “it predates Dracula! It’s a sapphic love story! Carmilla is a cooler vampire than Dracula!” And like…I guess the first two of those things are true, but there’s a very apparent reason for Dracula completely eclipsing Carmilla as the defining vampire classic. It’s just poorly written.
Dracula is well-paced. It builds tension. The characterization is good, other than the fact that Americans did not and do not talk like Quincy Morris did (lol). Bram Stoker was a good writer with a good grasp of English, of storytelling, of everything he set out to do.
Carmilla, the story and the character, both feel extremely two dimensional. No one is characterized well, the story is paced really poorly, things kind of just happen because they have to for the story to move somewhere and the fact of that feel extremely blatant. Carmilla switches between kinda creepy and morose to “oh I do adore you!” and the narrator is just like “and we were very fond of one another :)))” and you just have to kinda be like “oh okay word is bond” and like because of the weird jagged pacing and the way that the narrator and Carmilla just kinda become close right away but also a ton of shit happens in like 10 pages it feels either like everything is being told and time is passing for the reader at such a breakneck pace that you can’t be bothered to get immersed or give a fuck, OR that it has actually been a very short period of time, and therefore the timeline of external events and the timeline of the emotional bond between the two main characters feels unreasonable and rushed. Also some of the anagrams and “foreshadowing” and “symbolism” is just so weak and ham-fisted and laughable. I’m sorry.
Ik people like this book a lot and I don’t disparage them for it but I just don’t see why. Carmilla as a character has diffused into pop culture a lot and I think that this absorption of her into other places has done more than this book by far. Even for the weirdness that comes with the writing style and pacing of older English classics, this is just lackluster.
by BrennusRex
6 Comments
I don’t really think it’s a perfect story, but from what I remember, I liked it and read it all in a few hours. But I had never read anything of that time period and genre before and just felt very curious about it.
I fully agree, the pacing is awful
I like it but it’s not paced well. And to be fair, I think some of that is a product of how short it is, but…
Read it a fair few years ago. I thought it was alright. Not in the same league as Dracula. I also don’t remember it being as short as it is – it didn’t feel like a short book at the time.
It maybe is one of those books that its fame is down to its historical importance rather than how good a book it is.
I don’t care enough to defend it, but it is funny to complain that a *short story* feels a little rushed compared to a full length novel
I posted this in your other thread but I’ll repost it here just for discussion for people that only frequent this subreddit:
I disagree. Carmilla is definitely less of an action blockbuster type (Dracula was basically the 20th century equivalent of a Michael Bay film, just more thoughtful), but being contemplative, moody, and focused on atmosphere is not bad writing. By your logic, all of Woolf and Joyce’s works are trash.
Carmilla is quite well characterized IMO. She’s just weird and mysterious, which is what people like. There’s background given to her, you can tell what she’s supposed to be after and what she’s really after and what she thinks she’s after and these are different things which is interesting.
The prose is more convoluted than Dracula’s and it’s more in the style of early century writing but it is pretty nonetheless. Still, I think the issue here is that Dracula and Carmilla are just very different stories and you went into it expecting them to be similar. They both have vampires and homoeroticism, but that’s about it. Dracula is an action flick and Carmilla is a David Lynch movie.
Still, I wouldn’t argue it’s a perfect book or anything. It’s got several flaws, but just dismissing it as “bad” is eh.