Carmilla

Twenty-six years before Dracula.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu published the first significant work of vampire fiction, and a masterpiece of lesbian vampire fiction with it. Laura, fifteen, dreams of a cat-like beast with needles for teeth. Then another girl arrives. Laura gets weaker, the other girl's behaviour gets stranger, and by the end there is only one explanation left for it.

Black cherry and blackberry come at it sweet and syrupy, plum blossom and jasmine thinning them out on top. Cinnamon puts heat behind that. Then it turns. Dried roses take the sugar out, marshmallow goes soft and powdery, and Peru balsam pulls the whole thing down into something resinous and faintly animal.

Immortal Perfumes is a one-person house in Seattle, run since 2012 by JT Siems, who writes every formula and makes every bottle by hand in small batches. The subjects come from books and from history: writers, artists, historical figures. A vampire story that beat Dracula to print by twenty-six years. A Bavarian king's midnight banquets. The smell left on a magician's own papers.

An archive, not a department store counter, and it is run that way. Email is answered and orders are packed by the same person who blends them. The formulas are jojoba and alcohol, essential oils and aromachemicals, and the synthetics in them get a long plain-language defence on the house's own site instead of being kept out of sight. Nothing in the line is made from an animal, and every formula is original.