Full review at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books 
 Carmilla is an early vampire novel (it heavily influenced Dracula, which was written twenty-six years later). More specifically, it is Victorian Lesbian Vampire Erotica. People who think the Victorians were prudes clearly haven't read Carmilla, in which a lesbian vampire seduces her victim night after night and day after day with "languid" movements and many "caresses." 
 Like every proper gothic heroine, Laura has a dead mom (it's an absolute requirement in gothic fiction that the heroine's mother be deceased). Laura lives alone in the castle with two tutors and her devoted father, and she longs for a friend. She thinks she's about to gain a friend when her father's longtime buddy, The General, schedules a visit. The General is raising his niece who is Laura's age, but she dies of Victorian Novel Disease (symptoms: becoming progressively more pale, thin, and weak until finally fading away beautifully, with no inconvenient symptoms like sores, vomit, snot, or diarrhea to mar the loveliness of memory - it's a whole Victorian thing). Laura is distressed because the death of a young person is of course very sad, but also she is personally disappointed because she has literally no friends, not one, in the world. 
 What makes a novel like Carmilla interesting is that it was not an under-the-table production. It wasn't marketed as porn or sold as part of a Penny Dreadful. It was released in serial format in the magazine The Dark Blue, a literary magazine (in 1871 and 1872). The fact that Carmilla was published rather matter-of-factly should challenge our assumptions about The Victorians - but not too much. For the story to work with Victorian mores, Carmilla must be a sexual aggressor, and she must suffer for her actions and desires - and Laura can experience lust only because it is forced upon her (she is, in a sense, enchanted, which also means she can be read, in a real sense, as a rape victim). 
 Carmilla can be read as a straight up horror story, one with amazing imagery (the scene in which Laura dreams that she sees Carmilla standing at the foot of her bed in "her white nightdress, bathed, from her chin to her feet, in one stain of blood" made me yelp so loud I scared my dog). But it can also be read as a commentary on the awakening of female sexuality, as a story about abuse and control, and/or as a story about rape. 
 - Carrie S.