John William Polidori’s The Vampyre is the first English-language story written about the vampire as we know it, preceding Bram Stoker’s Dracula by nearly 80 years. Emanating from the same storytelling game at Lake Geneva which also produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Polidori’s tale bears the Romantic hallmarks of its Byronic influences, but stands wholly on its own despite drawing from Lord Byron’s own “Fragment of a Novel.”
Read here by Laurence R. Harvey and scored by Chris Bozzone, Cadabra Records‘s adaptation leans strongly into the modernity of this very British tale. While Stoker’s Dracula is wholly original in its epistolary form and construction, the elements extant in this early 19th century tale set the form for what would become the foundation of nearly every vampire story for the next two centuries. Lord Ruthven walks among the elite as one of them, not a mysterious figure in the shadows. None but the villagers suspect what’s going on. The vampire stalks young and lovely women, acting as much as a seducer as a monster, but a creature of the night no matter how you might perceive him.
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