Kat Dunn’s ‘Hungerstone’ is one of the best ‘Carmilla’ adaptations of all time

There are many brilliant adaptations of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s seminal gothic horror novella, Carmilla, but Kat Dunn’s Hungerstone is among the darkest, most sensuous, and most deliciously vengeful of them all.

In Dunn’s novel, Lady Lenore Crowther is ten years into her marriage to steel magnate Henry, childless and quietly miserable in their London home. She performs her wifely duties well—which includes keeping Henry’s darkest secret—and she flawlessly upholds both of their reputations even as his career ambitions relocate them to the British moorlands to host a hunting party she believes to be nearly impossible to pull off.

The night of their big move, Henry and Lenore are stalled by the discovery of a carriage crash and a young woman who seems to be its sole survivor—not unlike Lenore’s brush with death in the carriage crash that killed her parents when she was a child. They take the woman in at their new home, Nethershaw, and Carmilla Kernstein quickly occupies every inch of Lenore’s thoughts. The thing is, Lenore is certain she dreamed of Carmilla back in London, though she never voices this belief due to how absurd it is.

As Carmilla and Lenore spend more time together and Lenore begins to plumb the depths of how far her marriage has fallen, local girls in the surrounding villages fall prey to a terrible hunger. They feed on livestock, human hair, and even their husbands. But all Lenore craves … is Carmilla. And for the first time in a long time, she might choose what she wants rather than what she knows.

Dunn successfully updates and translates many aspects of Le Fanu’s original novella while continuing to center the story of Lenore and Carmilla at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Hungerstone puts the characters on more of an equal footing by positioning them firmly in adulthood and builds tension through the slow degradation of the life Lenore has, until now, always kept tightly contained.

Blood and hunger

From the epigraph, Dunn’s intentions are clear. She quotes Robert Eggers’s The Witch: “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” The novel is then split into two parts, entitled “It is not the dead you should fear” and “It is the living,” respectively. Lenore is our sole narrator and Dunn’s use of first-person puts the reader in her mind from the first sentence, which continues to build the expectations set by the epigraph and subtitle: “It starts with blood.”

Hungerstone doesn’t just start with blood. It’s drenched in it. Blood is one of the two major themes of the novel, explored through Lenore’s romantic and platonic relationships, her trauma, her ambition, and her desire. Her memories are awash with blood, as are her hopes for the future. The secret she keeps for Henry is bloody and the secrets they keep from each other are bloodier.

The other theme, hunger, is explored largely through the presence of other people in Lenore’s life, including Carmilla, Henry, her friend Cora, the workers at Nethershaw, and various villagers. Lenore is ravenous but used to quelling her appetite for polite company. As the story progresses, her hunger and the hunger of those around her transform and mutate into something nearly unrecognizable, until her only choice is to act on what she craves and take what she wants. This includes Carmilla—Hungerstone is an explicitly queer take on their partnership—and also several other major changes that completely transform her life.

By the end of the novel, the Lenore we meet in London at the start has all but disappeared. Her concept of freedom shifts dramatically throughout the book’s events, and her willingness to perform for the approval of men has been supplanted by a refusal to bow to anyone’s whims.

Dunn’s storytelling is fast-paced and substantive, giving readers plenty to sink their teeth into (pun intended). The world-building in Hungerstone not only pulls from the original Carmilla but from gothic horror as a whole, as well as feminist and queer literary canon. The result is an absolute masterclass in intense, sensual, gothic romance that doesn’t forgive the worst parts of vampire lore; nor does it mask them. The book also grapples with the realities of womanhood in the Victorian Age and how men pursuing ultimate power will stop at nothing to get what they want, no matter how many lives they ruin.

Carmilla is violent and a little unhinged, prone to bouts of jealousy and possessiveness. She communicates poorly and disappears more than once with little to no warning, leaving Lenore to pick up the pieces. Lenore is a perfect counterpart, simultaneously fascinated and disgusted by violence, adept at masking her true feelings, and quick to cruelty when the mood strikes her. Carmilla creates space for Lenore to break out of her routine and discover the danger lurking beneath the surface of mundanity, and Lenore gives Carmilla the push-and-pull she seeks from others but rarely finds.

In allowing both women to reclaim violence, make mistakes, mourn, and rage—both with each other and with others—Dunn affords them the chance to truly transform and pursue life beyond the social boxes in which they’re expected to remain. It’s impressive how truly vicious even her most poetic writing is in this book, and it’s even more impressive how the constant interplay between blood and hunger ultimately makes the romance between Lenore and Carmilla that much more believable and that much more intense, rather than making it seem repulsive or offputtingly vulgar. It’s such a fine line, and Dunn walks it so beautifully.

Although it’s only February, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Hungerstone at the top of every “best of” list come December. Dunn has done something truly magical here, and it’s all but impossible not to completely devour this novel from cover to cover while the world outside of its pages simply waits.

Hungerstone is available everywhere books are sold.