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Verdict: A short, warm rewrite of the 1872 story that invented the lesbian vampire, built specifically so that this time the women survive it — gentler on horror than the source, and unapologetic about that.
Best for: Readers who love the original Carmilla and have never forgiven its ending, and who want an evening-length gothic romance rather than a scary book.
Heat level: ★★★☆☆ (3/5 — on the page but not graphic; see below, there is no romance.io entry for this book)
Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5 — a 4.20 Goodreads average across 3,814 ratings, against a recurring complaint that it is a romance where readers wanted horror)
Tropes: Vampire romance, gothic retelling, historical, forbidden love, ill heroine, slow seduction, monster-lover, found ending, class and reputation, doomed-lovers reversal.
Carmilla and Laura by S.D. Simper is a standalone novella from Endless Night Publications, published in December 2018, and it is a direct answer to Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla — the 1872 novella that invented the sapphic vampire and then, in the way of 1872, destroyed her. Simper takes the same two women, the same schloss, the same slow seduction, and refuses the ending.
It has a 4.20 average across 3,814 Goodreads ratings, which makes it comfortably the most-read book on our sapphic vampire list and S.D. Simper’s most-read title by a distance. It also has a 3% did-not-finish rate on StoryGraph, one of the lowest we have recorded. The argument in the reviews is not about quality. It is about genre.
What Is Carmilla and Laura About?
This is a historical romance wearing gothic clothes, and knowing which of those is load-bearing will decide whether you enjoy it. Le Fanu’s original is a horror story in which a young woman’s mysterious illness turns out to be a beautiful house guest feeding on her, and it ends the way Victorian horror ended those stories. Simper keeps the architecture — the isolated schloss, the wasting sickness, the guest who arrives after a carriage accident — and rebuilds what it is for.
Laura is introduced through what she lacks: company, a mother, a life beyond a father’s estate and a father’s plans for her. Carmilla is introduced through what she assumes, which is that she already knows how this ends because it has ended the same way for centuries. The novella’s real invention is Carmilla’s backstory — Simper gives her an origin the original never bothered with, and it recasts her hunger as grief rather than appetite.
What Makes This Sapphic Gothic Retelling Work
- The ending, which is the entire point: Simper discards Le Fanu’s destruction. Five independent sources confirm the women survive together. For a text whose cultural legacy is a beheaded lesbian, that is not fan service — it is the thesis.
- The epilogue: Named more specifically than any other single element. One reader says it triggered “goosebumps and bliss,” and several treat it as the reason to read the book at all.
- Carmilla’s origin: The novella gives her a history the original withholds, rooted in suicide and a family line, and readers consistently name it as the strongest addition.
- The length: Under two hundred pages and a five-hour audiobook. It is a one-sitting book, and the compression is why the atmosphere holds — there is no baggy middle to sag.
- Laura gets to choose: The original’s Laura is acted upon from beginning to end. This one is not, and readers notice.
Book Synopsis
Laura lives in her father’s schloss in Styria with almost nobody for company, in the particular loneliness of a girl whose future has already been decided by other people. She has been ill, on and off, since childhood, and she has had a dream about a beautiful woman for as long as she can remember.
Then a carriage overturns outside the house and a young woman is left in their care — languid, evasive about her origins, and unaccountably familiar. Carmilla will not discuss her family, will not appear before afternoon, and will not stop looking at Laura in a way that neither of them names. Laura’s health begins to falter again. Girls in the surrounding villages are dying.
What the novella does with a story every reader already knows the shape of is slow it down and let the two women be honest earlier than they are supposed to be. Laura understands what Carmilla is well before the men with the paperwork arrive, and understanding it does not stop her. The question is not whether Carmilla is the monster. It is what Laura is prepared to do once she has decided she does not care.
My Review
This book exists to fix an ending, and it fixes it. That sounds like a small ambition and it is not. Carmilla is the founding text of the lesbian vampire — every book on our list descends from it — and it concludes with the woman staked and beheaded by a committee of men. A century and a half of queer readers have loved that novella while flinching at its last chapter. Simper wrote the version where they get out, and she does it without pretending the original was something other than what it was. Five separate sources confirm the resolution, and it is the single most-searched question about this book for a reason.
The second strength is compression. This is a novella — under two hundred pages, five hours in audio — and the discipline shows. The atmosphere does not have time to go slack, the seduction moves, and the epilogue lands hard enough that readers name it more often than any other element in the book. Simper also does the one genuinely inventive thing the retelling needed: she gives Carmilla an origin. Le Fanu never explains her; here the vampirism grows out of a death and a family line, and it turns the hunger into grief. That is the addition that earns the book its independent existence.
Where it struggles is horror, and the complaint is consistent enough to name: four independent reviewers say the gothic menace has been softened out. Carmilla is never really a threat, the dread never quite arrives, and one reader says outright that it lacked the creepy register the setting promises. Around that sit three readers who find it too faithful to be interesting — one uses the word fanfiction — and two who feel the book waves away Carmilla’s body count a little too easily. Two more found the romance declared faster than earned. None of that is a large minority: fewer than five per cent of ratings sit below three stars.
One expectation to reset, and it cuts both ways. If you came from Le Fanu wanting the same dread with a better ending, you will find the dread thinned. If you came from contemporary vampire romance wanting five peppers, you will find something considerably more restrained — three readers describe the sex as present but not graphic, and two complain it is too tame. It is a romance about wanting, written at a Victorian temperature on purpose.
My honest note: The best possible use of a retelling — it argues with its source instead of copying it. Read it for the ending you were always owed, not for a fright.
| Element | In Carmilla and Laura |
|---|---|
| Central relationship | Laura & Carmilla — the isolated daughter of the schloss and the vampire who has done this many times before |
| Core tropes | Gothic retelling, forbidden love, monster-lover, slow seduction, ill heroine, doomed-lovers reversal |
| Setting | Styria, a remote schloss, and the countryside where girls have started dying — Le Fanu’s own geography |
| Heat level | 3/5 — on the page but not graphic. There is no romance.io entry for this book; the number comes from reader reports |
| Series | Standalone novella — complete, with an epilogue. A Deluxe edition adds three bonus stories |
| Content notes | Blood, lesbophobia and homophobia as live plot pressure, death, murder, violence, fire and fire injury, injury detail, sexual content, gore, sexual assault, suicide and body horror all flagged at graphic weight by readers; rape, miscarriage, domestic abuse, pregnancy and physical abuse at moderate or minor weight; suicide is also the origin of Carmilla’s vampirism |
How Spicy Is Carmilla and Laura?
A 3 out of 5, and this one needs its working shown. There is no romance.io entry for this book at all — the database that supplies our heat bands has never catalogued it, which for a 3,814-rating title is unusual and tells you it is not being filed as adult romance. The number therefore comes from reader reports, and they are consistent: sex is on the page and it recurs, but it is not explicit. One reviewer calls the intimate scenes “really beautiful. Not clinical or smut like.” Another puts it as “nothing too explicit, but enough.”
The element worth naming in advance is that two readers actively wanted more, and one benchmarks it unfavourably against Tanith Lee’s vampire fiction for lacking overt eroticism. So three is a ceiling here rather than a midpoint — if you are coming from five-pepper indie vampire romance, calibrate down. Worth noting too: no source in our sweep describes the biting itself as eroticised, which separates this from most of the subgenre. If you want a comparable temperature, A Dowry of Blood sits in the same band and works the same gothic register.
Who Should Read This Book?
You’ll likely love it if: you have read Le Fanu and resented the last chapter, you want a complete gothic romance in one evening, you like your vampires sad rather than powerful, and you would rather have longing than explicit heat.
You may want to skip it if: you want genuine horror and dread, you find close retellings inherently uninteresting, you need explicit sex in a vampire romance, or you want a monster whose kills the narrative takes seriously.
In short: a corrective rather than a scare, and it is very good at being a corrective.
What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)
The professional record here is one review — Jude in the Stars gave the audiobook four stars in May 2021, calling it “a sexier, faster-paced retelling of Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu.” Nothing from The Lesbian Review, LezReviewBooks, The Lesbrary, Bookish Sapphic or I Heart SapphFic; a handful of independent blogs covered it, ranging from five stars to six out of ten. There is no trade coverage and no verifiable BookTok activity. What this book has instead of a campaign is the source text: Carmilla is public domain, permanently in circulation, and readers who finish it go looking for exactly this. That is a discovery engine no marketing budget can buy, and it explains a self-published novella reaching 3,814 ratings. There is an audiobook, narrated by Lois Ridge for Endless Night at 4 hours 59 minutes, released in 2021 — Jude in the Stars praises the narration, though one listener found it monotonous.
Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The ending, first and above everything — this is a book people recommend by its outcome. Then the epilogue specifically, which gets named more often than any other individual element; one reader reports “goosebumps and bliss.” Then the prose and the atmosphere. Then Carmilla’s expanded backstory, which readers treat as the retelling’s real contribution rather than a decoration. And running under all of it, a straightforward pleasure in the fact that the queer couple survives a story built to kill them.
What readers argue about and complain about: Horror, above everything. Four independent reviewers say the gothic dread has been defanged — Carmilla never reads as a genuine threat, and one says plainly that the creepy register never arrives. Second: three readers find it too faithful to justify itself, with one calling it fanfiction-adjacent and a blog scoring it six out of ten on the same grounds. Third: two find the romance declared faster than the page count earns. Two more object that Carmilla’s victims are morally waved away, which is a fair reading of a book that wants you to like her. And two wanted considerably more heat. There is one clean split worth flagging: StoryGraph’s own page tags it slow-paced while its reviewers skew fast-paced, which is what happens when a short book is dense rather than slow.
The standalone question worth asking first: it resolves, completely, and no sequel is needed or offered. There is a Deluxe edition — a leather-bound Kickstarter production — that adds three bonus stories, which is the only reason to think about editions at all. Where you go next is Simper’s own catalogue, and the numbers there are instructive: this is her most-read book by a wide margin at 3,814 ratings, but it is mid-pack on rating. Her Fallen Gods series climbs considerably higher — Among Gods and Monsters at 4.47, Tear the World Apart at 4.60, Eve of Endless Night at 4.69 — on much smaller and more self-selected audiences. Carmilla and Laura is the door into her work rather than the best room in it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Carmilla and Laura have a happy ending?
Yes. Simper discards Le Fanu’s destruction ending entirely — the women survive and stay together, confirmed by five independent sources including the author-adjacent summaries and multiple reviewers. This is the book’s whole reason for existing.
Do I need to read Le Fanu’s Carmilla first?
No, but it doubles the effect. The 1872 original is public domain and free, and it is short. Reading it first turns this from a nice vampire novella into a deliberate argument with a text that killed its heroine.
How spicy is Carmilla and Laura?
A 3/5, derived from reader reports rather than a database — romance.io has no entry for this book. Sex is on the page and recurring but not graphic, and two readers actively wanted more than they got.
Is Carmilla and Laura horror or romance?
Romance, and four separate reviewers say the horror is softened out. Carmilla is never written as a genuine threat, and the dread of the original does not survive the retelling. Go in for the love story.
How long is Carmilla and Laura?
It is a novella — between 138 and 187 pages depending on edition, and 4 hours 59 minutes in audio. Most readers finish it in one sitting.
Is there a Carmilla and Laura audiobook?
Yes — narrated by Lois Ridge for Endless Night Publications, running 4 hours 59 minutes, released in 2021. Jude in the Stars praised the narration; one listener found it flat, so sample it first.
If You Loved Carmilla and Laura, Read These Next
Readers recommending this book land most often on A Dowry of Blood, which works the same gothic register at a similar temperature and with considerably more cruelty in it. An Education in Malice comes up almost as often — readers describe it as a Carmilla-and-Laura dynamic moved to a women’s college — with the warning that it does not resolve like a romance. The third name in those threads is A Long Time Dead, which shares the Victorian setting and the melancholy but runs four hundred pages and a full pepper hotter.
For more in this register, browse that same guide or the full Book Reviews collection.
The Bottom Line
Carmilla and Laura is a book with one job and it does it. The founding text of this entire subgenre ends with its lesbian vampire staked and beheaded, and Simper wrote the version where the two women walk out of it together — with an epilogue readers keep singling out and a backstory for Carmilla that the original never bothered to supply. It is also gentler than its source, restrained where modern vampire romance is explicit, and close enough to Le Fanu that three readers wanted more invention. At under two hundred pages, finding out costs you an evening. Check Carmilla and Laura on Amazon →
The Eikna Overall Ranking
On the Eikna scale, Carmilla and Laura ranks as a corrective gothic novella — the 1872 original rewritten so the women live, softer on horror than its source, and best approached as a romance arguing with Le Fanu rather than as a book that will frighten you.
The Evidence Scorecard
Overall ★★★★☆ 4/5
- ✓ 4.20 across 3,814 Goodreads ratings
- ✓ 3% did-not-finish, among the lowest recorded
- ✓ Most-read title on our vampire list
- ✓ Four reviewers say the horror is defanged
Romance ★★★★☆ 4.1/5
- ✓ Seduction moves without stalling
- ✓ Laura chooses rather than is chosen
- ✓ Longing carries where heat does not
- ✓ Two readers find the declaration rushed
Characters ★★★★☆ 4/5
- ✓ Carmilla given an origin Le Fanu withheld
- ✓ Hunger rewritten as grief
- ✓ Laura has agency the original denied her
- ✓ Two readers say her victims are glossed over
Writing ★★★★☆ 4/5
- ✓ Prose and atmosphere top the praise list
- ✓ Novella length keeps it taut
- ✓ Period register held throughout
- ✓ Three readers find it too faithful to matter
Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 4.3/5
- ✓ Epilogue named more than anything else
- ✓ Answers a 150-year-old injury
- ✓ Lesbophobia written as real pressure
- ✓ Dread of the original does not survive
Heat Level ★★★☆☆ 3/5
- ✓ On the page and recurring
- ✓ Sensual rather than graphic
- ✓ No romance.io entry exists to band it
- ✓ Two readers wanted considerably more
Ending ★★★★★ 4.6/5
- ✓ Le Fanu’s destruction ending discarded
- ✓ Both women survive, confirmed five ways
- ✓ Epilogue closes it properly
- ✓ The reversal is predictable by design
Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 4.2/5
- ✓ One-sitting length invites returning
- ✓ Five-hour audiobook as a second pass
- ✓ Deluxe edition adds three bonus stories
- ✓ Little plot mystery left on a reread
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