Before Dracula: The Origins of Vampire Fiction

Bram Stoker gave the vampire its definitive form — but he did not invent it. When Dracula appeared in 1897, it was the culmination of nearly a century of bloodsuckers who had already been stalking European literature, and the story of where the vampire came from is as strange as any of the tales.

It begins, famously, on the same rainy summer of 1816 that produced Frankenstein: at the Villa Diodati, Lord Byron’s physician John Polidori wrote The Vampyre, and transformed the shambling peasant revenant of folklore into something new — the aristocratic, seductive, aloof nobleman who preys on high society. That single figure, modelled half on Byron himself, is the true ancestor of every glamorous vampire since. From there the creature evolved through the penny-dreadful gore of Varney the Vampire to the languid, lesbian menace of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla — the story that taught Stoker most of what he knew.

This volume gathers those founding texts — the tales that made the vampire before Dracula perfected him. Read them and you see the monster take shape, draft by draft, out of Romantic dread and Victorian desire.

It is the secret prehistory of the most enduring monster in modern fiction.

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