The Vampyre: With 12 Illustrations and a Free Online Audio File

The Vampyre is a short work of prose fiction written in 1819 by John William Polidori. The work is often viewed as the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre of fantasy fiction. The work is described by Christopher Frayling as "the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre."

The story was an immediate popular success, partly because of the Byron attribution and partly because it exploited the gothic horror predilections of the public. Polidori transformed the vampire from a character in folklore into the form that is recognized todayan aristocratic fiend who preys among high society.

The story had its genesis in the summer of 1816. Lord Byron and his young physician John Polidori were staying at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva and were visited by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont.

Kept indoors by the "incessant rain" of that "wet, ungenial summer," over three days in June the five turned to telling fantastical tales, and then writing their own.

Fueled by ghost stories such as the Fantasmagoriana, William Beckford's Vathek and quantities of laudanum, Mary Shelley, in collaboration with Percy Bysshe Shelley, produced what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

Polidori was inspired by a fragmentary story of Byron's, Fragment of a Novel (1816), also known as "A Fragment" and "The Burial: A Fragment", and in "two or three idle mornings" produced "The Vampyre".

This book is unabridged and appears as it was first intended. First published in 1819.

The audio link will only work on Kobo's iOS and Android apps.

Dettagli