Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever.”
This classic Gothic horror novel preceded Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 25 years and was its inspiration. Carmilla is the first vampire story to feature a lesbian vampire. “Chilling and subtly erotic.”
CARMILLA
by Joseph Le Fanu
New Urge Editions (NU-119)
paperback, 180 pp., $12.95
Descended from a long line of scribbles, Henry has arrived from the UK in time to accept the role of “Everyman” — a stick figure for our times. Although not fully formed (some might even say “crudely drawn”), he, like the rest of us, scrawls through life in wonder and confusion. He is sagebrush blown down a lonesome highway, a cloned cartoon at the mercy of fickle Fate. Henry doesn’t have answers, he dropped out of Doodle U. and the side effects of Nietzschian philosophy and post-Hegelian dualism have taken their toll. How else to explain that Czechoslovakian pimple on the end of his nose. We try not to laugh at his flubs and flaws, his Hollywood dreams and Kafkaesque nightmares, but it’s impossible. And that’s a good reason to grab this book.
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