Carmilla

Our Horror section—which we finally created only a year or so ago—is threatening, creature-like, to take over the entire Made-up side of our store. (The True side has its own horrors.) And not just with new favorites like Stephen Graham Jones and Isabel Cañas, but with classics of the genre finding new readers: Dracula, of course, but also Robert W. Chambers's The King in Yellow and this little vampire morsel, which predated Dracula by two decades and likely influenced that novel by a fellow Irishman. A more straightforward tale than Dracula, Carmilla carries two particular thrills: the delicious contrast, so characteristic of 19th-century Gothics, between its placidly formal language of science and nobility and the ruthless blood hunger at its heart; and the nature of that hunger, the attraction between two young women that has made it not only a vampire classic, but a (still-debated) sapphic one.