This collection presents The Vampyre alongside 11 ghoulish stories, also written in the 19th century.
The predecessor of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Lord Ruthven embodies a seductive evil that inhabits our fantasies and fears no less today than it did two centuries ago. The Vampyre tells of a monstrous demon – mirthless, cold and ashen-skinned, and yet possessed of an eloquence and beauty that proves fatally alluring to those who fall under the gaze of his ‘dead grey eye’. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was born, while Polidori created the grisly tale that would make him the father of the vampire genre.
The conversation turned to ghost stories, and as they dared each other to tell ever-more gruesome and spine-tingling tales, they created two of the most enduring figures of the gothic horror genre.
Among the guests were Percy Bysshe Shelley and his future wife, Mary Godwin. On a stormy night in June 1816, Lord Byron and his physician John Polidori hosted a gathering at the Villa Diodati, a manor house by Lake Geneva.
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