In a lonely schloss deep in the Austrian forest, nineteen-year-old Laura leads a sheltered, uneventful life until a carriage accident leaves a mysterious young woman named Carmilla in her father’s care.

Carmilla is beautiful, magnetic, and strange. She sleeps through the day, wanders at night, and seems to know Laura from a dream that predates their meeting by twelve years. As their friendship deepens, Carmilla speaks of love as possession and of closeness as inevitability, and Laura finds herself drawn in even as something in her recoils. Meanwhile, the surrounding villages begin to lose their young women to a wasting illness no physician can explain. Laura, too, has begun to dream of something at her throat.

Predating Dracula by twenty-five years, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla is the tale that gave the vampire story its shadows, its seduction, and its slow, creeping dread.