Carmilla

In an isolated castle in Styria, a lonely young woman named Laura welcomes a mysterious guest — beautiful, languid, and strangely intense — left behind after a carriage accident outside the gates. As their friendship deepens into something stranger, Laura begins to suffer from nightmares and a slow, inexplicable illness. First published in 1872, twenty-five years before Dracula, Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla is one of the founding texts of vampire fiction and a direct influence on Bram Stoker — a slow-burning Gothic novella of intimacy, dread, and the uncanny.