John William Polidori & Varla Ventura 
Vampyre: A Tale 
Magical Creatures, A Weiser Books Collection

The story of the conception of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is a tale well known to horror devotees. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft (Shelley) were reading ghost stories aloud to one another one stormy night at Byron’s lake house in Geneva, Switzerland. Byron prompted his partygoers to write a ghostly tale of their own. Out of this came the beginnings of one of the most famous horror novels of all time, Frankenstein, a Modern Prometheus. As it happened, John William Polidori was also there that fated night. Personal physician to Lord Byron and a writer as a pastime, Polidori crafted The Vampyre, A Tale from a sketch of a story that Byron composed that same evening. Often wrongly advertised as a story by Byron himself, The Vampyre has remained a relatively obscure tale of terror. The first vampire story published in English, Polidori’s work predates the seminal Bram Stoker’s Dracula by more than seventy years.