The Vampyre

The summer of 1816 is famous for the births of two of the main tropes of horror--Frankenstein's monster and the urbane vampire. While summering in Switzerland, Lord Byron and his guests, Percy and Mary Shelley and Byron's physician, John Polidori, had a ghost-story-telling contest. Mary Shelley had a dream about a man who created another man, which became the novel Frankenstein. Polidori ended up writing The Vampyre, a short work which took the Eastern European folklore of the vampire and turned it something different, which Bram Stoker would later expound upon, creating Dracula.

Polidori's book is not that good--it's an example of Gothic romance and is fairly tedious--but historically it's very important, for it introduces the vampire to the Gothic romance, and is the first instance of the vampire as a dapper man-about-town. Polidori's vampire, Lord Ruthven, is a man who suddenly appears in London and and joins the upper crust society. He accompanies the narrator, Aubrey, to Rome and Greece, and though murders take place Aubrey doesn't connect them to Ruthven.

In Greece, Ruthven is shot by robbers, and he makes Aubrey swear not to tell anyone about this for one year and one day. Ruthven later shows up quite well in London, and marries Aubrey's sister on the day before the oath expires. Of course, Aubrey's sister is killed, her blood drained.

Many thought the book was book was written by Lord Byron, but this was not true. Byron's entry in the contest, Fragment of a Novel, was something of a basis for Polidori's work, but Byron abandoned it.

The book is a quick read and of interest to those who fancy horror, but is also a bit of a slog, as Polidori uses florid touches and extremely long paragraphs. At times, though, he can curdle the blood: "There was no colour upon her cheek, not even upon her lip; yet there was a stillness about her face that seemed almost as attaching as the life that once dwelt there:--upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein:--to this the men pointed, crying, simultaneously struck with horror, 'A Vampyre! a Vampyre!'"

Hard to believe, but this is where it all started, and it was written by a doctor. Polidori would commit suicide in 1821.