A Rookie’s Experience of Vampire Fiction:

Reading Carmilla

Going into a book knowing that it arguably canonised vampire fiction (or Gothic horror) – written in 1872 (thus 26 years before Bram Stoker’s Dracula) – makes for an intimidating first impression. Yet, at no point did I feel overwhelmed by Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla. I relaxed into an easy-going reading of the vampire novella, as if finally tasting chocolate after only ever having chocolate-flavoured things.

That said, it’s time for a confession: my regard for vampire fiction until quite recently was The Twilight Saga, The Vampire Diaries, and a cartoon adaptation of Dracula, voiced by Adam Sandler. So, what I’m saying is: I knew very little about it. I have always understood that part of the package with genre-fiction and thus vampire fiction are tropes, but until reading Carmilla, I didn’t realise that tropes can…

Ahead of Cardiff BookTalk’s Margaret Atwood event on 10 December, here are a couple of questions and discussion points you may want to consider in order to make the most of the event and the subject of Margaret Atwood and her thrilling, Booker-winning sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments.

 Is The Testaments in its own right a worthy winner of The Booker Prize 2019?

 There has been a lot of discussion around whether or not this year’s Booker judges made the right decision in naming Margaret Atwood joint winner alongside Bernadine Everisto for the 2019 prize. Though the judges claimed it was simply impossible to choose a winner, this seems like a bit of a cop-out – are prizes not all by their very nature difficult to choose winners of? The implication is that this is the first time in the history of the UK’s most famous…