Le Fanu

The reporter cites a 19th-century short story by Irish author J. Sheridan Le Fanu — about a man who goes crazy after receiving threatening letters from someone who called himself the Watcher — as “the closest literary connection anyone could draw.”

First on our tour of teen terror, a classic 1872 vampire novella: “Carmilla,” by Sheridan Le Fanu.

The publisher brought out an edition of “Carmilla,” a Victorian story by Sheridan Le Fanu that has become important in queer studies, with professional annotations and footnotes.

Lavie might counter with Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla,” the progenitor of lesbian vampires.

Decades before Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” J. Sheridan Le Fanu perfected the vampire aesthetic in his haunting 1872 novella “Carmilla.”