Tonight, as part of our fourth annual spooky sleep story series, we’ll read the opening to “Carmilla”, an 1872 Gothic novella by Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu. Our series will run every Monday of October.

This is one of the early works of vampire fiction, predating Bram Stoker's Dracula by 26 years.

Le Fanu presents the story as part of the casebook of Dr. Hesselius, whose departures from medical orthodoxy rank him as the first occult detective in literature.

Occult detective fiction is a subgenre of detective fiction that combines the tropes of the main genre with those of supernatural, fantasy and/or horror fiction. The occult detective is employed in cases involving ghosts, demons and other supernatural elements, and the detectives are sometimes portrayed as having psychic or other magical powers.

If you enjoy this episode, be sure to listen to “The Hound of the Baskervilles” episode from last October, which would also be considered occult detective fiction, if only Sherlock was not so good at solving mysteries at the end. Also, you can find our reading of “Dracula” from October 2020.

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