The Inky Phoenix | Carmilla (Clockwork Editions)

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Carmilla (Clockwork Editions)

Joseph Sheridan Lefanu

Carmen Maria Machado

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Isolated in a remote mansion in a central European forest, Laura longs for companionship—until a carriage accident brings another young woman into her life: the secretive and sometimes erratic Carmilla.

As Carmilla's actions become more puzzling and volatile, Laura develops bizarre symptoms, and as her health goes into decline, Laura and her father discover something monstrous.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's compelling tale of a young woman's seduction by a female vampire was a source of influence for Bram Stoker's Dracula, which it predates by over a quarter century. Carmilla was originally serialized from 1871 to 1872 and went on to inspire adaptations in film, opera, and beyond, including the cult classic web series by the same name.

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The Inky Phoenix\ \ Kathryn Budig\ \ • Jun 18 2025

\ \ In celebration of our June Inky Phoenix book club pick, I curated a list of my favorite vampire reads, both old and new, for Tertulia. AND they're offering 25% off BURY OUR BONES IN THE MIDNIGHT SOIL. Just use code INKYPH.\ \ See the list here:\ \ https://tertulia.com/editorial-list/kathryn-budigs-vampy-books-to-sink-your-teeth-into](https://inkyphoenix.binderybooks.com/item/vOuiy7Cr917HztuuxnHM/)

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The Inky Phoenix\ \ Kathryn Budig\ \ • Oct 5 2022

It’s been a while, but our “amuse book” (a play on the term amuse-bouche: a single, bite-sized hors d'œuvre) is back with CARMILLA.\ \ Originally published in 1871, this sapphic vampire novella inspired Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula, and continues to inspire (and chill!) today. \ \ The perfect companion read to our October pick House of Hunger!

It’s been a while, but our “amuse book” (a play on the term amuse-bouche: a single, bite-sized hors d'œuvre) is back with CARMILLA.

Originally published in 1871, this sapphic vampire novella inspired Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula, and continues to inspire (and chill!) today.

The perfect companion read to our October pick House of Hunger!

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Bee's Books\ \ Bailee Russo\ \ • Jun 3

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I’ve always had the perhaps unpopular literary opinion that Le Fanu’s Carmilla beats Stoker’s Dracula by a country mile, and it’s not just because I like to see women get what they want. \ \ Written 25 years before Dracula, Carmilla is short, with an economy of language that makes the entire story feel like a single feverish dream. Both were written during an era of incredible social change and wrestled with ideas about modernity, class and social order, feminine sexual agency, and moral purity. The vampire in both Carmilla and Dracula embodies the perversion that threatens “goodness.” Both are also rooted in Victorian anxieties about cleanliness and contagion, the rising influence of the middle classes, the parasitism of the nobility class, and, more simply, intolerance of “the other.” Count Dracula is of a noble, ancient line, while Carmilla’s background is ambiguous but her uncanny magnetism and influence place her firmly in this position of an “other” who commands significant power. \ \ Anyway (and this is all necessary background, I promise), where Le Fanu succeeds for me in a way Stoker doesn’t–besides that Stoker loved himself a dead horse for beating–is in the utter failure to make me fear Carmilla. She is not grotesque as Dracula often is for Stoker. And the moments of longing and eroticism in Carmilla are so compelling, so tender, that I surely would have been vampire food.\ \ I mean, look at this: \ \ “I have been in love with no one, and never shall," she whispered, "unless it should be with you."\ \ How beautiful she looked in the moonlight!\ \ Shy and strange was the look with which she quickly hid her face in my neck and hair, with tumultuous sighs, that seemed almost to sob, and pressed in mine a hand that trembled.\ \ Her soft cheek was glowing against mine. "Darling, darling," she murmured, "I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so."\ \ I started from her.\ \ She was gazing on me with eyes from which all fire, all meaning had flown, and a face colorless and apathetic.\ \ "Is there a chill in the air, dear?" she said drowsily. "I almost shiver; have I been dreaming? Let us come in. Come; come; come in.”\ \ You’re swooning, right? You’re swooning. It’s an incredibly effective work and it doesn’t need 600 pages to be so. \ \ Carmilla laid a foundation for much of the subsequent vampire fiction of the European canon, and the popularity has never stalled. Now, what I loved about Kat Dunn’s Hungerstone, was that it honored the original work while also subverting its narrative into a bloody celebration of good-for-her-style feminine sexual agency. \ \ Lenore is a wife of ten years to a social-climbing steel magnate, Henry, but their marriage is stale and unsatisfying. They’ve just moved into the imposing Nethershaw manor in the English countryside, surrounded by wind-blown moors and a sense of looming dread. \ \ When a carriage accident brings the mysterious Carmilla to stay in the manor, something begins to stir in Lenore. \ \ So, it’s a Carmilla retelling, obviously, and it takes all of what is lovely about the original – the atmospheric sense of dread that drapes itself across the narrative like wine-red velvet, the bloodthirsty longing, the tender eroticism, but it also expands upon the idea of a woman’s hunger within a repressive context. Lenore’s personhood, womanhood, ability to experience pleasure, and agency are all tightly restricted, and Carmilla is the force that helps her to reacquaint herself with want. This hunger permeates the book, and it’s brutal, bloody, and so, so satisfying. This thematic exploration of desire is deepened through the parallel explorations of the appetites of the capitalist class, the industrial revolution, and colonial expansion. It's also subversive of the original narrative in that Carmilla's arrival is indeed a threat to the patriarchal status quo and to the carefully curated sterility of Lenore's life -- but this danger is ultimately imperative for Lenore's survival and liberation. \ \ Two things I really appreciate: one, that this is not a story about Carmilla. She is an almost surface-level character, and little of her motivation or backstory is necessary for the story. Though what bites we get of her on-page are delicious (she’s sarcastic, strange, beautiful, and mean – consider me seduced! I’ve seen enough!), she is little else, ultimately, than a catalyst for Lenore. This is not a love story – at least, not one between the two women, though the development of their relationship has tension and tenderness enough to get by on. Lenore, on the other hand, is an expertly fleshed-out protagonist. She’s riddled with juxtapositions, complications, and short-comings. She is intelligent but fearful, self-repressed but full of rage, self-involved but self-aware. She is not good, she was never meant to be, and it’s for this reason that she’s so compelling. \ \ Second, that the tone and pacing don’t recreate but implies the original novel’s sensory experience. Much of the first half of our story is a meandering through Lenore’s interior self, and it’s quiet, introspective, but never dull. The prose is lovely and elegant, and throughout the setting reverberates an anxious, eerie ticking of a clock, with the distinct impression that time is running out. In contrast, the final third of the story is a blood-drenched frenzy, though this sudden change of pace feels intuitively correct. It is like the death throes of a wounded animal; there is a heavy sense of inevitability, as though it is only right, only natural, that Lenore should rip control of her life back with her own bared teeth, that things should erupt from everywhere and nowhere, all at once.

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Peppered Ink\ \ Mary\ \ • Jan 11

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ash.reads.horror\ \ ash\ \ • Nov 14 2025

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\ \ It's time for another author interview! Last week we talked with author Julia Jackson about her debut novel Powder & Poison. If you haven't read that interview you definitely should! Along with my interview with Stephanie Rose.\ \ This week help me in welcoming author Kelly Dwyer! Kelly Dwyer is the author of Ghost Mother, a chilling psychological/ghost horror.\ \ \ \ The book follows Lilly Bly and her husband as they take on a fixer-upper of a house way out of their price range. After purchasing the house, Lilly discovers the house has a dark history. Strange occurrences begin happening. Lilly begins to wonder if they are real or if they are all in her head.\ \ 1. Use this first question as an introduction. Tell us a little about yourself and your book.\ \

My name is Kelly Dwyer, and I am the author of GHOST MOTHER, a psychological ghost story. I'm a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and I currently divide my time between Los Angeles, where I grew up, and Wisconsin. I am married with a young adult daughter and a really cute pug named Roman.\ \ 2. You released Ghost Mother a year ago. It was such a powerful read. What inspired you to write it?\ \ Thank you so much, Ash. :) The day my husband and I were about to close on our first house, we found out there had been a murder in it. This was in Baraboo, Wisconsin, where the Ringling Brothers were from. Their first cousins were the Gollmar Brothers, who also owned a circus. Our house (a modest Craftsman, not a run-down mansion) had been built by one of the Gollmar Brothers, and when he died, his widow lived there by herself, and used to feed transients during the Depression. One night, during a robbery gone wrong, one of these men murdered her. My husband and I had a decision to make--knowing this, should we still buy the house? We decided that since it happened so long ago (in the 1930s), and since the woman who had lived in the house seemed really nice, we would go ahead, and indeed, we never felt any sort of haunting in the eight years we lived there. But it made me think--What if there had been the kind of tragic murder there that would make someone not want to buy a house? What if someone who bought the house did feel a haunting? What kind of person would that be? It was when I reread Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw" and I started imagining the ambiguity of--is the house haunted or is the protagonist losing touch with reality?--that the novel really came together for me.\ \ 3. I absolutely love the "couple moves to a new house that needs repairs in hopes it'll save their marriage' trope that is featured in Ghost Mother. What are some of your favorite horror tropes? Any favorite books that feature these tropes?\ \ Yes, it's so fun to write--and read--books that dig into tropes or put a new spin on them! When I was writing GHOST MOTHER, I read a lot of haunted house books; I think my favorites, besides James', are The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, Rebecca by Daphne du Maruier, and The Shining by Stephen King. (See The Most Classic Haunted House books by Kelly Dwyer for an article I wrote on the subject.) I was also inspired by films like "Rosemary's Baby" and the TV show "The Haunting of Hill House." I think the thing that interested me the most about that trope was the question, "What is haunting you?" Two people--as you say, in this case, a couple--could move into a house, and one person will feel haunted, while the other doesn't sense anything. Is that because one person is more open to the supernatural? Is that because ghosts seek certain people out? Or is it because someone is so haunted by their past--their losses, their traumas--that they are prone to sense a haunting where maybe there isn't one? I don't know, but I love the question, and as a writer, I love the ambiguity involved\ \ 4. What was the most difficult part of writing Ghost Mother?\ \ The most difficult part of writing GHOST MOTHER was getting the backstory of the 1950s tragedy in the house right. It had to be compelling. I knew I wanted a nod to the circus, which had been a part of our former house's history. But it also had to be thematically resonant. I wrote three completely different backstories before my agent said, "Yep, this is it." Now, looking back, it seems so obvious, but wow, it took me a while!\ \ 5. Were there any scenes or characters that were harder to write than others? Any that were easier?\ \ Getting Jack and Lilly's relationship to feel real and be complicated was a challenge for me. Bobby Shawcross was the easiest character to write! I don't know where he came from, but everything about him--his speech, his voice, his appearance--just landed in my head fully formed.\ \ 6. Were there any scenes that you had to edit out of Ghost Mother that you wish you had left in?\ \ I love this question, because the short answer is, No! I sold GHOST MOTHER at a 100 pages longer than it is now. My editor asked me to make it tighter. She didn't tell me what to cut, or suggest a word count, but I knew I wanted it to be shorter than 350 pages. (I think it came in at 336 by the end.) To cut those hundred pages, I cut any repetitious scenes, started the story moving quicker, and cut out any unnecessary backstory. At the time, I thought maybe those scenes from the past were important so that the reader could understand and sympathize with Lilly, but after I cut them, I realized that I need to write them to understand and sympathize with Lilly, but the reader didn't need to read them. My new mantra is, When in doubt, cut!\ \ 7. Do you have any other projects in the works?\ \ Yes indeed! I am working on a new novel inspired by fairy tales, Hollywood, and a mansion with a bg, dark secret. It's a lot of fun!\ \ 8. 2025 has been a great year for horror. What have been your top three reads that you've read so far?\ \ Oh, boy. So many--and I'm so behind! I'm reading The Buffalo Hunter now, and it's taking me a while, because I read and reread Stephen Graham Jones' sentences again and again. He's amazing. I also really enjoyed and admired Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix, Hungerstone by Kat Dunn, The Lamb by Lucy Rose, and--one that was written a few years ago, in 1872, but I just read for the first time-- Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu. Give me a gothic lesbian vampire story set in an isolated castle and I'm in!\ \ 9. Do you have any special routines that help you get ready to write?\ \ I like to set candles, set an intention. Like Proust and Edith Wharton, I write in bed.\ \ 10. If Ghost Mother was ever adapted into a film, do you have a dream cast?\ \ GHOST MOTHER is in pre-pre-pre-pre... production, meaning, my film agent introduced me to a director I really like, and she's interested in writing the screenplay and making the film. I would love to see this novel on the screen, and I feel like there are so many women actors about Lilly's age (37 or thereabouts) who would be amazing in the role: Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence, Natalie Portman (think of her in The Black Swan), Anna Taylor-Joy... maybe Florence Pugh wouldn't be too young by the time it was cast. :) I always pictured Jack as looking like Theo James. Anybody free?\ \ 11. Bonus question from Kelly: I'd like to ask you and your readers a question now, if you don't mind. Do you like horror books about horror movies? If so, what do you like about them? If not, what do you dislike? Do you have any favorites/ any recommendations? \ \ Thanks for the question, Kelly! I am a huge fan of Hollywood horror! There are several books I just love such as Night Film, Curse of The Reaper, Burn The Negative, Silver Nitrate, and more. I'll drop a few links to posts on my instagram where I showcase some more horror set on movie screens/ hollywood.\ \ Film/Hollywood Horror\ \ Hollywood Horror\ \ Special thanks again to Kelly for taking the time to talk with me! Be sure to pick up a copy of Ghost Mother if you haven't already read it. It was one of my favorites last year!\ \ You can follow Kelly on Instagram or on her website.\ \ Join for free or login](https://ashreadshorror.binderybooks.com/item/7nf3tTvIGO7Y4eK8lvTb/)