Carmilla

Laura lives with her father in a lonely castle in a forest of Styria. One evening a carriage overturns near the castle, and a mysterious lady leaves her daughter, Carmilla, in their care. The beautiful, languid guest becomes Laura's intimate friend, but she never prays, sleeps all day and seems to know Laura from a dream of childhood, while the young women of the district begin to fall ill and die.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873), an Irish writer of mysteries and ghost stories, published Carmilla in 1872, twenty-five years before Dracula, and it influenced Bram Stoker, also a Dubliner. It is one of the first vampire stories in English, short, atmospheric and more unsettling than frightening.