I might just have to take exception to the impression that our protagonist was just an edgelord. It seemed that she hit him with Renfield thrall pretty early, and that colored a lot of his obsession. There's a lot of interesting bits to unpack separating his trallish obsession from his privilege, along with considering the source of her loathing of him.
Also, I wonder how much of the perception of the character may have depended on which version of the text Alasdair read. I just went through the cleaned document we had that was easy to post, and noticed several of the more compelling bits of writing were missing. For example, this paragraph was in the magazine (and narration) but not in the text:
"With a start, I realized the nature of my thoughts, and for an instant lost all thought in surprize. Never in my twenty-two years had I felt love before. My fancies had been otherwise directed—a moss-grown, fallen gravestone was a dearer thing to me to contemplate than the fairest face in all the world. Yet, surely, what I felt now was love!"
That bolded sentence above (emphasis mine) shrinks a predisposition while being so delightfully goth.
Here's another:
“One or two nights more and you will walk beside me,” I called to her. “I have watched the water at noon, and it hardly moves at all. I threw a scrap of paper into the canal, and it whirled and swung a little where a thin skim of oil lay on the water down there—oil from the big, dirty city you are well out of. But though I watched and watched, I could not see it move downward at all. Perhaps tomorrow night, or the night after, you will walk on the bank with me. I hope it will be clear and moonlight; and I will be near enough to see you clearly—as well as you seem always to see me in darkness or moonlight, equally well. And perhaps I will kiss you—but not unless you let me."
That paragraph is also missing, and that last sentence has a distinct impact on how the protagonist is perceived.
I guess I have some text cleanup to do and look at where the versions deviated. I am curious to see what editor trimmed up this story and when, affecting those subtle but critical changes.