Feature: Three Twisted & Tragic Tales of Love for Valentine's Day

Feeling poetic or darkly romantic during this most amorous of holidays? If you’re longing for a break from saccharine heart-shaped boxes of chocolates or mass-produced soppy teddy bears, look no further than this short serving of spooky, gothic tales to get you in the mood, only in an alternative way.

*May contain small spoilers*

Annabel Lee – Edgar Allan Poe (1849)

As is usually the case with Poe, nothing is viewed as more terrible or poetically rousing than the untimely death of a beautiful woman. Countless people, through pop-culture exposure, scholarly pursuits or being bona fide Poe appreciators, will be able to recall the incantatory name of “Lenore”, the lamented central figure of Poe’s universally known poem, The Raven. However, another work by the same author embodies this elegantly tragic sentiment, which is even stronger than perhaps any other.

Annabel Lee is said to be Poe’s final poem to be finished. Potentially inspired by a love that he himself genuinely lost to sickness and even more suitably gothic and tragic, was posthumously published very shortly after his own death. In addition, the poem would go on to inspire Vladimir Nabokov greatly, helping to lay the foundations for his own (in)famously controversial “love story”. But what’s the heartrending crux that makes this short piece stand out?

With cold but graceful descriptions, Poe speaks of a young couple so madly and purely besotted with one another that, according to the narrator, the covetous angels (or seraphs) of Heaven, through their jealousy, see to it that the couple’s intense and littoral love is cut tragically short. By summoning a chill from the nearby ocean, they set to commit the poor titular Annabel Lee to an early fate. Upon her death, she is subsequently taken by her relatives (who, perhaps, looked down upon her lover and their devotion to one another) and commit her to her resting place near the shore. Our protagonist is left to pine for his love and states that nothing, not even death, can separate their two souls.

As with most of Poe’s poems concerning love, beauty, death and reflection, Annabelle Lee has an ending flooded with ambiguity, should the reader allow themselves to be taken by its gentle, sombre waves. However, this particular ending may leave the reader with two very polarising mental images and conclusions. Depending on your reading or inclination for the depraved, you may envisage a lovelorn man, destroyed by his bereavement, laying to rest at night and hearing his lost love’s voice luring him to sleep from beyond, peacefully drifting off to where he can be with her in his dreams. Or we are treated to the thought of this grief-stricken man, less symbolically, making nightly visits to the sepulchre which holds his darling and sequestering himself away with her putrid form, to be lulled to rest by the cadence of the waves, a visual as saddening as it may be disgusting.

Either way, there is no denying that no one ever quite mastered the blending of the lurid, melancholic and the morosely beautiful, as Poe did.

Carmilla – Sheridan Le Fanu (1872)

The original sapphic vampiric romance, the literary manifestation of the instantly recognisable Bloody Kisses album cover by Type O Negative. Carmilla has it all. Ancient lineages and idiosyncratic aristocrats, stately homes and castle-like structures reduced to silent shadows of their bygone prime, the seemingly sentient setting of a wooded European backdrop and, of course, a beguiling nocturnal femme-fatale. In fact, this slim, tawdry tale has just about every trope and cliché going, and why?…because it played a vital role in crafting them and ushering their proliferation into our collective culture.

The salacious and the grim are what draw people in and what they stick around for, be it in film, literature or the daily news. Since time immemorial, there has been no separating the erotic and the thanatotic; people’s heads will turn for a car crash, and they will always remember a sex scene. Carmilla, however, may not be the telling of a tribade tryst that its preceding reputation commonly paints it as.

Undoubtedly risqué and suggestive for its era, the book is not overtly sexual or even directly romantic in narrative or content. The novella instead focuses on Carmilla’s preternatural beauty and the virulent, nebulous allure about her that captivates and unnerves in the most tantalising of ways. The novel’s fame as the ultimate steamy lesbian vampire story could be a testimony to one of two factors: though it lacks explicit reveals and eschews certain fantasy-fulfilling scenarios, Le Fanu penned a tale so thick with sensual atmosphere and character that readers were hotly consumed by it and their own imaginations, thus believing they’d read more than they had, or, could it just be that we humans have forever anchored our memories of a work in its more prurient moments and overtones. Whether it was Carmilla’s perfidious beauty matched with her author’s palpable sense of mood or merely our dirty little minds is forever up for debate. But let’s move on to some of this book’s other merits.

The creative fecundity this work offers cannot be overstated, its sylvan locale, the echoes of nobility within the characters and its rich literary language. The use of nightly apparitions and the introduction of the archetypal occult detective. The seamless blend of funereal yet luscious. Fanu has gifted posterity, not just a lascivious, but a sophisticated volume in both the vampire and gothic genre at large. Although not the household name and generation-spanning phenom of the novel it would later inspire by one Abraham Stoker; Carmilla has left its indelible fang marks on horror and gothic culture.

One example that proves the sentiments and impact of the book have not been forgotten is the case of bands such as Cradle of Filth. Featured on their revered 1996 effort Dusk and Her Embrace, the song A Gothic Romance contains strong lyrical allusions to Carmilla, telling of a moonlit dalliance with an undead, vampiric and irresistible inamorata, effortlessly enchanting the narrator with her “feline allure” (an unmissable reference for those familiar with the book). The makeup-donning metallers even boast a musical interlude, Carmilla’s Masque, a slightly less inconspicuous title.

Enjoy this classic and feel the true, sanguineous rush of its fatal attraction.

The Spectre Bridegroom – Washington Irving (1819)

As shown in his works, such as Rip Van Winkle (and through the comical, malingering eponymous character), Washington Irving is known for borrowing from folklore and myth to create timeless stories. Above all else is his magnum opus, a cornerstone of all things ghoulish and gothic. It’s hard to imagine a world without some form of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. But as with Poe’s works or the way in which Carmilla lends its gaunt shoulders for Dracula’s legacy to proudly perch upon, if you scratch beneath the surface even slightly, there are great and grim treasures awaiting.

The Spectre Bridegroom is Irving’s gorgeously ghostly and beautifully written lesser-known piece. It is a short tale of savage bandits, mistaken identity, and more trappings of the gothic and romantic, employing ebony black horses and family feuds that can only be quelled by the marriage of a weary Count’s beautiful daughter. Through twists, turns and mystery, a slightly unorthodox love story is formed. To avoid ruining any surprises, here is a small taste of this phantasmal world.

The scene is set in yet another Germanic landscape, sprawling with thorny woods beneath high towers and drawbridges. In the story’s eerie hinterlands, we meet Medieval patricians and knights inside these decrepit walls, all coalescing to bring about what soon becomes a doomed betrothal—or so it seems.

What unfolds is an eldritch little love story told with flavours of deception and dramatic irony. It is a gloomy yet witty piece of fiction that contains the levity of juvenile romance in tandem with folkloric premonitions and a hint of the fey. With this concoction, it’s easy to see why Irving’s writings went on to influence the likes of Tim Burton, whose films share a common theme of forbidden or unlikely bonds between cadaverous, loveable characters. By the end of odd stories such as these, we see that these strange beings find a way to express their love and find happiness, albeit via journeys and ways that suitably are as bizarre and atypical as they themselves are.