BOOK CLUB Academiae Obscuriae – Dracula + Carmilla

The Academiae Obscuriae Book Club invites you to a night of candlelight and old blood. In our next meeting we go back to the roots of vampire literature with two Gothic landmarks: Carmilla, by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and Dracula, by Bram Stoker.

Published a quarter of a century before Stoker’s novel, Carmilla is a short, atmospheric tale set in an isolated Styrian castle. Young Laura lives a quiet, lonely life until a carriage accident brings a mysterious girl, Carmilla, into her home. Their intense friendship grows warmer and more troubling as Laura’s health begins to fail, and as strange deaths spread through the region.

Dracula needs little introduction. Told through letters, diaries and newspaper clippings, it follows Jonathan Harker’s journey to Transylvania and the arrival of the ancient Count Dracula in England. A group of unlikely allies, led by Professor Van Helsing, then races to understand and stop a threat that preys on the most vulnerable.

Reading the two together, we’ll explore fear of the foreign, desire and repression, contagion, gender, science versus superstition, and the ways the vampire reflects the anxieties of its age.