posted 16 july 2026
disclosure: i've received an advance review copy of the book in exchange for this review. all opinions my own, and the author has not read this post beforehand. the book comes out august 11th.
our crimson cage is an upcoming novella by ladz that's absolutely my hole, made for me. lesbian vampire erotic horror yum! however ☝. i'd actually describe the book as romance before i would horror, and reading it as such will lead to a more favorable review. that's because horror implies threat and tension that this book generally lacks, and that when present gets resolved quickly or forgotten about.
but that's putting the cart before the horse. let's start from the beginning. skipping the praise and author's note / content warnings though, because they're marketing that will paint the picture of a much darker book. let's maybe skip the blurb as well. "She is not prepared to solve a murder"
. well she won't need to.
our crimson cage is a carmilla retelling, one that follows the tried and true tradition of doing it in name only. laura has been aged up to 28 (and married), and the location shifted from austria to poland [1]. these changes make laura and her household feel much less isolated, with the town playing a more prominent role. this puts it somewhat in alignment with et mourir de plaisir (1960) to me.
the isolation is further lessened by the addition of a couple other pov characters (besides karmila herself, there's laura's new maid elżbieta and the town priest father paweł [2]). elżbieta is the secondary protagonist, and the one responsible for freeing karmila from her confinement in the first place. she's a former nun, who fled her convent after having her relationship with another nun found out. you'll not be let to forget this fact, which is her main character trait (and mostly used to lend some catholic flavor to her erotic narration). father paweł here serves mostly as a bridge between laura and the havoc karmila is wreaking in town (not that much, all things considered, because the book happens over a very brief period of time).
now this is all fine and good. i'm not really attached to carmilla, change it as much as you'd like. but none of the choices made here ever really congealed into much of a horror story to me. in my essay about the novella, i posited that "if carmilla is to be a ~sapphic icon~ she can't be a predatory lesbian"
, and i think some of that is what's at play here. karmila does kill, yes, but she's never really very harmful to our protagonists. she is, for all intents and purposes, the brooding bad girl love interest, whose violence mostly affects characters we haven't any attachment to, and is often done for the protagonists' sakes.
similarly, we have a laura that's much more confident and independent, someone with responsibilities as the governor's wife, someone the priest goes to when karmila's first victim is found. she and elżbieta already come with a fair bit of preexisting character development, i think especially when it comes to dismissing and downplaying religion. with a reluctance to really disenfranchise our protagonists, they don't have much place to go, other than getting their desires fulfilled.
this is why i prefer looking at our crimson cage through the lens of romance and erotica, not horror. because then it's not really that troublesome that karmila never truly preys upon laura and elżbieta, that vampiric feeding is never shown to make the victim weak [3]. hell, karmila sucks the menses and associated cramps right out of laura, that seems to me like a clear positive for her health. and then it's not as strange that the priest and the town don't pose any threat to three whole lesbians, one of them being a vampire. as romance, the assurance that everything is gonna be fine for our throuple is a perk instead of a fumble, and vampiric transformation is a straight upgrade no one worries too much about. elżbieta's immortal soul is already doomed, and laura doesn't put much stock in the concept, so they just get to do lesbianisms together.
as romance you don't really get much of a seduction either, but it's not that much an issue. and you do get a bunch of lesbian sex. i like that :). the scenes are overall pretty well written and paced, and fairly varied (despite the recurrent theme of menstruation). though i will say the prose sometimes strains against itself, and not just during sex. it's not a something black and arterial situation, but i'd be lying if i said it didn't have some unparseable and empty sentences here and there [4], with a tendency to prioritize similes over description.
my review might be a little too focused on criticizing the book's weak points, but ultimately our crimson cage really was a pleasant (if rather lukewarm) read. it's a pretty snappy page-turner, the sort of book i quite enjoy in between long and dense reads — and i think it stands above its peers a dowry of blood and unholy with eyes like wolves (is it gauche to bring them up? comparison was inevitable, especially with the latter also being f/f/f and inspired by carmilla). sometimes it's all about three women sucking blood and boobs in 19th century poland. still, i can't help but think of what could have been...
[1]: if reading on ebook, i recommend putting a polish dictionary in there. i use wikdict (koreader on a jailbroken kindle). the polish words are fairly easy to infer from context, but having the dictionary is fun.
[2]: laura and elżbieta's chapters are in first person, while karmila and father paweł's are in third person. a move that isn't really confusing, it's always clear who we're focusing on, but i did find rather baffling.
[3]: yes she kills a girl that she fed on, but i'm talking of the trope of wasting away consumption-style here.
[4]: however there was a horrendous offender — which i do feel kinda bad about bringing up because it was only one instance, and it's not even a matter of shitty prose as much as something that got overlooked while editing: "No skirt, just her white blouse worn as a dress with just her carmine, sable, and white-striped skirt serving as a covering. It sits much too high on her thighs."
read that as many times as you'd like, it won't help. this odd contrivance is in service of a full bush upskirt shot, which is a very noble cause but could easily have been achieved with her wearing just a chemise. it's just as appalingly unprofessional, but more succint and also gives opportunity to describe her breasts through the thin fabric.