“The Lady of the House of Love” (1975)

This story by Angela Carter is ostensibly, more or less, a straight-up vampire story. But little is ever really straight-up with Carter. The story obeys lots of vampire story rules: set in a deserted village in Romania (central / eastern Europe), sunlight harmful, weird (or no) reflections in mirrors, sleeping in a coffin. The female vampire lives in a decrepit mansion in the abandoned village. She is very old, spends her days drawing the same tarot cards over and over. She can appear as young as a teen. She feeds on small woodland mammals and people passing through. She has a servant, an old woman dressed in black. This story—and Carter’s work generally—is stuffed with heavy portents and symbols. The vampire’s eyeglasses break at one point and she cuts herself trying to clean up the shards. A fountain in the village square, with pure spring water bubbling from a lion’s mouth, is used to attract victims. The servant, who is mute, lures them with gestures of a promised meal. The intended victim here is a young man touring the country on a bicycle (a symbol, Carter notes, of the geometrically rational, “two spheres and a straight line”). He is a virgin. It is summer 1914. We see the dance of seduction—invited by the servant for dinner, then coffee and hazy mind-addled conversation with the vampire in her bedroom into the wee hours—but it’s not entirely clear how or why our young man escapes her. Is it because he is a virgin? Or perhaps because he is on the verge of being tossed into the greater blood-sucking maw of World War I? He wakes in the morning with dim memories of the night before. The vampire has died. Carter writes her epitaph:

I will vanish in the morning light; I was only an invention of darkness.
And I leave you as a souvenir the dark fanged rose I plucked from between my thighs, like a flower laid on a grave.

Roses are a recurring symbol not only in Carter’s work, but she does seem to have specific affinities for them. Shortly after this interlude our young man receives his draft notice and goes into training. There’s one more apparition of the rose, and then the story ends, “Next day, his regiment embarked for France.”

Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats
Read story online.
Listen to story online.