John William Polidori 42 min read

The mysterious, magnetic Lord Ruthven draws the young Aubrey into his orbit, and across Europe, death and ruin follow the pale nobleman, until Aubrey grasps the monstrous truth too late.

John William Polidori's 1819 tale is the foundational work of vampire fiction. Eerie, elegant, immensely influential. Read it for the story that created the aristocratic vampire, born of the same Geneva ghost-story challenge as Frankenstein, and gave us the suave, predatory Lord Ruthven, ancestor of Dracula and every seductive vampire since.

In its time

Published in 1819, during the 1810s, frankenstein's decade.

Reading it

42 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).