Horror Various Authors: From the Vampire Archives. v1. 28 Mar. 2023

In the summer of 1816, the famous ghost story contest between several giants of Romantic literature (Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Claire Clairmont) gave rise to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and an unfinished vampire horror story written by Lord Byron, now known as “A Fragment,” also as “The Burial: A Fragment.”

This is included here because John Polidori (Byron’s physician) based his novella, The Vampyre (which was originally falsely attributed in print to Lord Byron), on the Byron fragment.

This 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 to successfully fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre.”

This predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 26 years, and has been noted as an influence on Stoker’s masterwork. Scholars have also noted the important place that “Carmilla” holds in shifting the portrayal of vampires in modern fiction: Carmilla, the title character, is the original prototype for a legion of female and lesbian vampires.

This is one of the most famous pieces of English literature, and has come to dominate both popular and scholarly treatments of vampire fiction. Many of the book’s characters have entered popular culture as archetypal versions of their characters; for example, Count Dracula as the quintessential vampire, and Abraham Van Helsing as an iconic vampire hunter. The novel has been adapted for film over 30 times, and its characters have made numerous appearances in virtually all media.