REVIEW OF KYLE MARFFIN’S CARMILLA: THE RETURN
Kyle Marffin. Carmilla: The Return.
(ISSN 1932-9598)
Le Fanu’s novella “Carmilla” remains the most-often written about of Le Fanu’s works, not least of all because the vampire is a woman who preys on another woman, suggesting an implied homosexuality. This idea of transgressive desire in the work appears in much of the criticism, especially the commentary of the past forty or fifty years.
V.S. Pritchett, in his introduction to the 1947 edition of In a Glass Darkly, in which the tale appears, is the first critic to note the sterility of the homosexuality implied in Le Fanu’s original. A few years later, Peter Penzoldt, in his ground-breaking Freudian study of supernatural horror fiction, The Supernatural in Fiction (1952), supposes that Le Fanu probably did not know the technical term “lesbian” or understand the true nature of what he was describing. However, in 1872, the anonymous contemporary reviewer of Le Fanu in The Saturday Review, uses the term “vulgar” in reference to it.
While it is easy to speculate on authorial intent, the fact is that filmmakers in particular have chosen to explore the lesbian theme implicit in the Le Fanu. The 1931 film of In a Glass Darkly by Carl Theodor Dreyer, Vampyr, hints at the transgessive nature of the vampire and her victim fleetingly. In 1960, Roger Vadim’s film Blood and Roses is the first director who depicts this nature more directly. In the 1970 Hammer Film Production, The Vampire Lovers, the voluptuous Ingrid Pitt as an aggressively homosexual vampire virtually carries the film and leads the way to two more Hammer Films based on Le Fanu, Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil. These three films have since been referred to as “the Karnstein trilogy,” bringing into play Carmilla’s surname.
Fiction writers have often been inspired, if not directly influenced by, Le Fanu and his female vampire. Le Fanu’s influence on Stoker is well-known. But not until Kyle Marffin’s novel Carmilla: The Return, does one find an overt sequel to Le Fanu’s classic. I came to this book thinking that any sequel to Le Fanu would be dreadful, but I was quite surprised.
The strong point of the novel is the believable and psychologically complex characters. As in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, the vampires are not always content with their lot in life—or rather, death. Marffin’s central protagonist Lauren Vestal, is ambivalent about her encounters with Carmilla. In Marffin’s novel Carmilla escaped destruction by placing the corpse of one of her victims in her grave: Laura’s father, General Spielsdorf, and Baron Vordenberg are not aware they are staking and decapitating the wrong vampire. The protagonist is not sure that Carmilla is a vampire. Carmilla herself questions her own behavior and is actually hesitant to victimize Lauren.
Very interesting and believable characters, such as Steve Michaels, a one time lover of Lauren, who is depicted as having passionate and loving sex in one scene with Lauren (in contrast to the sex she has with Carmilla), draw the reader in and make him care about what happens to these people. Granted, Marffin carries sexual vampirism to the extreme by creating characters who explore sexual climax and bloodsucking simultaneously. Rather than making these scenes seem gratuitous they are integral to the development of Marffin’s characters.
On the whole, the novel works well, but concludes with a very unhappy ending showing Lauren as divorcing love from her sexuality and actually assuming the identity of the unloving predator Carmilla, whom Lauren finally hates. The men in the novel, like the men in Le Fanu, attempt to destroy Carmilla, but they are destroyed themselves in the Marffin. Marffin’s prose style is really quite clear and effective and underscores the elegant sadness of these characters. I recommend Marffin’s novel to all readers and scholars of Le Fanu who are interested in a different take on his famous female vampire.
Gary William Crawford