A Writer’s Worst Nightmare…Or Is It?

So there I was, scrolling in a sapphic Facebook group (as one does). A discussion came up about the 1872 novella Carmilla (by which my Her Undying Thirst is inspired). I was really excited, because people were commenting on things they didn’t like in the original work, such as the nonconsensual nature of the relationship and the way the work demonizes homosexuality (both of which are things I specifically seek to redress in my version). And then it happened: someone posted a pic of a book they were currently enjoying, a retelling of Carmilla called Hungerstone by Kat Dunn.

My heart skipped a beat. I know there have been other takes on Carmilla over the years (both books and other media, including a Canadian web series that looks pretty fun). But at first glance, this one looked an awful lot like mine. And it’s recent. It came out just a few weeks ago.

Now, my reaction is not due to any sense of ownership of the idea. Both Kat Dunn and I are stealing our idea from the original, after all. Rather, my initial worry was that readers and publishers might not see the appeal in yet another version of the Carmilla story if they love Kat Dunn’s.

And then I realized that I was being STUPID.

How many adaptations of classics have there been? Even simultaneous ones? How many version of Dracula? Frankenstein? The Odyssey? There have been TWO remakes of the Nosferatu film in the last year and a half (one with Doug Jones, who’s one of my favorite actors ever, the other with Bill Skarsgard), which is itself an adaptation of the Dracula story. A few years ago I read a book called The Wife Upstairs by Freida McFadden (which I enjoyed) because I mistakenly thought it was a modern retelling of Jane Eyre I had heard about. It turned out that the modern retelling of Jane Eyre was a different The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins (which was also good), published within a year of McFadden’s version. And after reading those two, I also read Verity by Colleen Hoover, which is SHOCKINGLY similar to McFadden’s The Wife Upstairs (so much so that McFadden had to come out and state that she hadn’t read Hoover’s “Verity” before she wrote her book). You know what? All three books were worthwhile and successful.

Heck, how many smutty retellings of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Beauty and the Beast have there been recently?

And then I looked up the synopses and reviews of Kat Dunn’s Hungerstone. And it turned out that I was being even STUPIDER than I originally thought. It turns out that her version is quite different from mine. And it looks really good. If anything, it’ll whet people’s appetites for additional explorations of haunting, fascinating story; in fact, some of the reviews mentioned they wanted more of the vampire stuff…and mine has LOTS of that.

So tell me, readers: do you have an example of two (or more) different retellings of the same story that you really like?

In Proximum, Regina Vestra