Abstract: This article articulates a psychoanalytic reading of Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe by analysing desire in relation to Melanie Klein’s oral sadistic stage, a desire which, in the author’s grim fairytale with Gothic-laden aesthetics, is metaphorically expressed through vampirism and cannibalism.

Keywords: Freudianism; Melanie Klein; ambivalence; desire; Christos Tsiolkas; Dead Europe; guilt; incorporation; cannibalism; vampirism; symbiotic union; homosexuality

Copyright © Jean-François Vernay 2012. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged.