The Vampyre

John Polidori's novella 'The Vampyre' had its genesis in the famous 'Year Without a Summer' (1816), when Lord Byron challenged a group of his friends to each write a chilling horror story (Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' also emerged from this session). Polidori's work was highly influential, and has been described as "the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre." It was a major influence on Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'.