• addie@feddit.ukEnglish
      15·
      1 day ago

      You might ask how “lesbian vampires in the deep forest of Austria, creepy things happen” could possibly go wrong:

      • Carmilla has cool vampire powers - unusual ones, since it’s an early vampire book. Her main ability is that she’s a charming liar. The other ones are not foreshadowed, appear once, and then are never seen again. Zero drama.

      • does some amazing “show, don’t tell” storytelling, but then tells you anyway in case you missed it

      • massive info dump right at the end where it turns out that the creepy things that happened were the same as what happened to the other girls in the village, ruining the pacing. Should have doled that out throughout the story so that we’d be excited to find out when Laura (Carmilla’s victim) finally realised, you dolt.

      • Carmilla has gone to great lengths to hide her true grave, so how will we resolve the race-against-time at the end? Well, fortunately we’ve brought a guy with a map that there’s no particular reason he should have it, and we thought to bring the minister as well so there’s no threat, phew.

      • ‘tell you a story that happened to me ten years ago’ should just have been struck out as pointless unless it was the set-up for a twist or something

      Not that Dracula is exactly the finest literary work in all history, but:

      • creepy things happen

      • old dude with great knowledge turns up about a quarter of the way in, listing all of the vampire’s strengths and weaknesses, which are then adhered to at all times

      • the enemy is a cunning and dangerous foe, and there are scenes in the book demonstrating this

      • heroes desperately gather clues while suffering great setbacks, and have a race-against-time to prevent terrible thing, the outcome of which is uncertain and not spoiled in advance. You know, drama.

      It’s a shame. You wouldn’t need to change much about Carmilla to make it a truly great book - delete some stuff, reorder the rest, couple of extra scenes. Sheridan La Fanu has a lot of writing talent. But it fumbles a few of the basics.

        • KnilAdlez [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          7·
          1 day ago

          Nobody knew how to write a novel yet.

          It’s so funny that ~450 years after the invention of the printing press, after thousands of years of human oral tradition, we still hadn’t figured out narrative structure

          • Speaker [e/em/eir]@hexbear.netEnglish
            5·
            14 hours ago

            People are still printing The Travels of Marco Polo, a book whose final paragraph is the author saying “let us now turn our attention to the Black Sea”, naming a single mountain, then saying “actually, everybody already knows about that, let’s talk about something else” and then THE BOOK FUCKING ENDS.

            People are still printing the Odyssey, 10 pages of which is “everything pop culture understands to be the story contained in the poem” and the other 500 pages is Odysseus getting all his friends killed, learning nothing, and then murdering a bunch of his slaves and all the dudes hanging around his wife. The families of these dead men show up for revenge, Athena does a literal deus ex machina, and the story ends.

            If I were a much funnier person I would walk this out to some kind of “narrative structure is bourgeois decadence” bit, but I guess I’ll just leave it at “apparently no one needed a coherent narrative until the last couple of centuries”. 😄