Carmilla

Published a quarter-century before Bram Stoker's Dracula, Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla is one of the foundational works of vampire fiction. In a lonely castle deep in the forests of Styria, the young and isolated Laura lives quietly with her widowed father — until a carriage accident leaves a beautiful, languid stranger named Carmilla in their care.

Laura is at once drawn to and unnerved by their guest, who sleeps by day, will say nothing of her past, and presses upon Laura an intense, possessive affection that blurs the line between friendship and desire. As Carmilla's presence deepens, young women in the surrounding countryside begin to sicken and die, and Laura herself is visited by feverish dreams and a wasting illness whose source she cannot name.

Gothic, dreamlike and charged with an unmistakable erotic undercurrent, Carmilla is a slender masterpiece of dread that helped define the vampire tale and remains startlingly modern in its portrait of longing, predation and fear.