Rebecca (Sarah Bolger) finds Ernessa another receptacle of her confessions, like her diary.
meaning. Readers who follow this advice will likely be amazed to see how frequently and deftly Klein has hidden clues to the narrator’s true nature in plain sight. Throughout the novel, Ernessa and the narrator are described as “two of a kind”—a characterization that the narrator insists is based on their shared Judaism. However, it is impor- tant to note that there seems to be a shared telepathic bond between the two—as well as a tendency to communicate via dreams, just as Le Fanu’s Laura and Carmilla did. When the narrator reads about the various ways to identify a vampire, attentive readers will note that both she and Ernessa display these very same characteris- tics—including an overdeveloped sense of smell, an aversion to crosses, and supernatural strength. In a startling confession, she reveals how, during her first kiss, she suddenly found herself biting her male partner under the eye, and how, as a toddler, she bit her mother’s thigh hard enough to draw blood. Furthermore, her repeated assertions that she could, if desired, make Mr. Davies fall in love with her suggest that she shares Ernessa’s ability to hypnotically charm her prey.
Both the narrator and Ernessa describe vam- pirism as an inherited condition—subtly linking it to the diathesis-stress theory of mental illness,
meaning that one inherits a genetic propensity to- ward a disorder, the manifestation of which de- pends on the stress the organism is exposed to. In this case, vampirism is the diathesis, and suicide the stressor. It is important to note that the narrator’s father, whose strange nocturnal habits are described throughout the narrative, was re- searching vampirism before his death, and insisted in his suicide note that his body be cremated and the ashes scattered to the wind. Given this legacy, the act of “becoming” for the narrator is poten- tially far more perilous than the reader is initially led to believe, and her final decision to reject both Ernessa and her father is described in the adult narrator’s poignant epilogue as not only a choice to “grow up,” but to “become human.” A stunning conclusion in its own right, Klein’s surprising dénouement also encourages reassess- ment of the ending of Le Fanu’s CARMILLA, invit- ing the reader to consider the possibility that Laura, a Karnstein by birth, was recognized as kin by Carmilla, and did not, in fact, reject this kinship after Carmilla’s destruction. In this light, Laura’s narrative, written earnestly and intimately to her “town lady,” might be better interpreted not as a confession, but rather as an attempt at seduction— the pursuit of her own eternal companion.
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