You had me at sapphic vampires.

It's criminal that this was published 26 years before Bram Stoker's Dracula, and is just as good for me, but it doesn't have the same repute. 

I mean the plot is pretty much what you'd expect from a vampire story. Classic, no nonsense, straight to the point. People get bitten, a mysterious illness befalls them, they die, so on and so forth. But I feel this deserves 5 stars because as I said, it predates Dracula, it by no means adheres to the heteronormative perspective, it's dark, spooky, full of lust, it's just a delight.

I may be biased because I love vampire books, but for something written in 1872, this is just the perfect Gothic novella, and it was miles ahead of its time.