For the eight session of our Dreadful Thoughts story club we're heading way back to the Villa Diodati - summer residence of Byron & Co. and scene of a spooky story competition that helped produce not only Frankenstein, but John Polidori's seminal "The Vampyre" (1819).

To set the scene here follows a brief summary of Polidori's brief life:

John Polidori (1795-1821) was the son of a distinguished Italian scholar and translator. He received his medical degree from Edinburgh in 1815 at the unusually early age of 19, and displayed his fascination with the stranger aspects of science in his thesis on somnambulism. In 1816 he became Lord Byron's personal physician and travelling companion, [returning] to England in 1817 but [failing] to establish himself as a writer or a physician. He committed suicide in his father's house in 1821.¹

Told you it was brief.

Failed careers and (prussic acid assisted) suicide aside, Polidori's "The Vampyre" can still lay claim to being (in Christopher Frayling's words) "probably the most influential horror story of all time"² and "the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre."

A fine and formative place, then, to start our cycle of classic monster discussions.

Go. Read (over the weekend). Come back here and chat. Details as follows.

Story: "The Vampyre" (html), (pdf), (Project Gutenberg page).

Meeting: Monday, 29th September, 9 p.m.

1. Polidori, John The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre (OUP, 2008), p. 255. [back]
2. Ibid. p. 257. [back]