The Castle of the Carpathians — Jules Verne

The Castle of the Carpathians is Jules Verne's Gothic novel about the fierce dangers of celebrity and obsessive love. La Stilla is a singer of incomparable talent and extraordinary beauty. Audiences adore her, many men passionately desire her, but she has never felt love for anyone or anything except music. Enter Baron de Gortz, whose menacing presence at every performance terrifies La Stilla, and Count Franz de Télek, who offers to save her by taking her away from the world she knows and hiding her in a castle in Romania. In the end, the struggle between these two men for the body and soul of La Stilla happens in a different place, in the Baron's haunted Castle of the Carpathians. By turns funny, romantic, and horrifying, The Castle of the Carpathians is one of Jules Verne's most unusual stories. The peasants who live in the little town near the castle believe in vampires, in dragons, and in beautiful female syrens. Are all such legends dead in the light of science? Is Baron de Gortz a psychic vampire draining La Stilla's life each time he watches her? Or is La Stilla herself a syren whose irresistable fascination tangles and destroys the lives of men? This is the only complete translation in English and the first new edition of that translation in over a hundred years.