My soundtrack today is Dead Can Dance. This is more about the snow outside putting me in a quiet nostalgic mood than about how perfect it is for The Vampyre though, so feel free to substitute something more emo. It’s a pretty emo story.

A couple of the books on my gothic reading list are actually short stories. The Vampyre by John Polidori is only about 20 pages long but those 20 pages changed vampire stories completely by introducing the romantic vampire into the literary world.

The story started as a half-formed idea of Lord Byron’s, his contribution to the famous contest that spawned Frankenstein. Byron lost interest in the story but his friend/employee John Polidori took it up and reworked it into the Vampyre. The story’s main character, Lord Ruthven, is what we now see so often in vampire stories–brooding, magnetic, irresistible, using up young men and women alike and leaving them ruined while he himself is untouched by the tragedies he causes.

Polidori based the character on Lord Byron, with whom he had a rocky relationship. Polidori never meant to have the story published. In fact, when it was first published without Polidori’s permission the story was attributed to Lord Byron. Polidori was never able to straighten out the mess and never able to move on from Byron’s mistreatment of him. Eventually he fell into depression and drinking and committed suicide, adding an uncomfortable stab of reality to the idea of Byron as a charismatic vampire carelessly ruining young lives.

This is available on Project Gutenberg but I actually read it as part of an anthology called, sensibly enough, The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre. It included a sampling of horror tales popular in magazines of the era. The other stories are quite varied, running from gritty crime stories to darkly funny morality tales to poetic tragedies in the traditional gothic style. I won’t review them in detail, but some were quite good. I especially like the anonymous Life in Death, which I can’t find a link to online, and Letitia E. Landon’s The Bride of Lindorf. This one is beautifully written and nicely gothic in the Ann Radcliffe tradition. If you’ve wondered about the old gothic tales but didn’t want to commit to a whole novel, The Bride of Lindorf is a wonderful taste of what they’re about.

To the whole book I’d give three haunted stars, but to just The Vampyre I’d give two. It’s inventive and important, but not the most compelling gothic story. As a piece of art, Carmilla was much more exciting. But I feel bad for Polidori because Lord Byron sounds like a real asshole.