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.
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
Carmilla is the original vampire novel
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.
Nobody knew how to write a novel yet. Lots of attempts have been made to do an updated version well, like Hungerstone. https://lesbrary.com/hungerstone-by-kat-dunn/
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