An education in malice

A retelling of Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 novella Carmilla, in which vampires and poets investigate eternity. Laura Sheridan arrives at Saint Perpetua's Women's College in Massachusetts in 1968. A cherubic churchgoer fresh from Mississippi, she manages to nudge her way into the selective senior poetry seminar despite her nerves and naïveté. At the first meeting, Professor Evelyn De Lafontaine selects Laura to recite a poem, lavishing her with frightfully incisive attention. In the same seminar is Carmilla Karnstein, a beautiful student Laura met briefly at the opening bonfire, staring daggers at her. Carmilla appears captivated by De Lafontaine and seems to have more than a teacher's pet relationship with her. De Lafontaine invites Laura to an exclusive breakout seminar, and she enters the professor's apartment to find Carmilla the only other attendee. The girls jostle for their professor's affection, reciting Marlowe, scribbling poetry, and exchanging (increasingly) heated glances. Laura puzzles over the relationship between her rival and her mentor--until she sees De Lafontaine sink her fangs into Carmilla's willingly proffered neck. Over the course of absinthe-soaked evenings and bloody, sleepless nights, Laura learns that lurking beneath Saint Perpetua's is a labyrinthine, sinister world to which she has been invited. "Right and wrong don't exist, Laura," Carmilla tells her. "There is only art and ugliness…" There is plenty of artful ugliness to follow, a fusion Gibson seems to relish. There are wrists fettered with ribbon, throats stained with blood and lipstick, and corpses with fresh pink nail polish. Gibson crams her sentences with erudite references befitting her painfully well-read protagonists. Carmilla, Laura, and De Lafontaine are all somewhat lacking in dimensionality, each an archetypal collection of traits building the plot to a stale conclusion. What the story lacks in freshness it makes up for in ambience; from sinful all-night salons to hedonistic Halloween parties, Laura's world thrums with dark pleasures that will leave you wanting more. A gleam-in-its-eye seduction of a story that may not ultimately satisfy. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.