Author: Amy Chu
Illustrations: Soo Lee
First published: 2025
Contains spoilers
The Blurb: The final chapter of this Bram Stoker Award-winning graphic novel reimagination of Sheridan LeFanu's classic Carmilla!
Athena's daughter Ella journeys to Oxford, England where a mysterious university benefactor hires her for what seems like a simple research position, but leads her straight into the heart of danger...and the Lo family back into the complicated web of Carmilla herself. As deaths begin to pile up on campus, Ella becomes entangled with a secret supernatural society of hard partying immortals. And just as Athena once did, Ella is about to discover some family secrets of her own...
A seductive, supernatural thriller about mortality and mother/daughter relationships.
The review: The closing chapter – you can read my thoughts on Volume 1 and Volume 2 - the author takes the interesting premise of leaving Athena’s story, moving forward in time, and concentrating on the daughter raised by her and her wife Jess. Ella has recently graduated but worries what career her Art History Major will lead her too. That is until she gets a mysterious call from England and offered a job in Oxford by the equally mysterious Gilda. Sharp-eyed readers will spot the name from Jewelle Gomez’ stories about an African American lesbian vampire and, in this series, though Carmilla uses pseudonyms she does not stick to anagrams.
Once at Oxford she does not meet Glida but is set to work cataloguing her collection. She also meets a trio of party-hards, Liz Bathory, Yilmar Barbarossa and Yuri Tepes. Yep, you’ve guessed it… all vampires. Carmilla, when we meet her, has dramatically aged through drinking HIV infected blood and believes Ella to be her way to heal (as Athena had tasted a little of her blood long before her pregnancy). Then there is another member of Carmilla’s family who surfaces.
The ideas are great, as was the change of generational perspective, but the execution comes off as unfortunately hurried. There was a feeling of things being crammed in, the characters (bar Ella) were thin though this may have been because we were always using Ella's view (19th century flashbacks notwithstanding). I wanted to enjoy this as much as the previous volumes but the undue haste made it miss a little more than the earlier parts. 6 out of 10.
In Paperback @ Amazon US
In Paperback @ Amazon UK
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