The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre by Chris Baldick

Oxford University Press, 1997 - Literary Criticism - 278 pages. The present volume selects thirteen other tales of the macabre first published in the leading London and Dublin magazines between 18, including Edward Bulwer’s chilling account of the doppelganger, Letitia Landon’s elegant reworking of the Gothic romance, William Carleton’s terrifying description of an actual lynching, and James Hogg’s ghoulish exploitation of the cholera epidemic of 1831–2. The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre. ‘The Vampyre’ was first published in 1819 in the London New Monthly Magazine. Polidori’s tale introduced the vampire into English fiction, and launched a vampire craze that has never subsided. He edited The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (1992), and is the author of In Frankensteins Shadow (1987), Criticism and Literary Theory 1890 to the Present (1996), and other works of literary history. Set in Italy, Greece, and London, Polidori’s tales is a reaction to the dominating presence of his employer Lord Byron, and transformed the figure of the vampire from the bestial ghoul of earlier mythologies into the glamorous aristocrat whose violence and sexual allure make him literally a ‘lady-killer’. Professor Chris Baldick is Professor of English at Goldsmiths College, University of London. The story started as a half-formed idea of Lord Byron’s, his contribution to the famous contest that spawned Frankenstein.

‘Upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein: – to this the men pointed, crying, simultaneously struck with horror, “a Vampyre, a Vampyre!”’ John Polidori’s classic tale of the vampyre was a product of the same ghost-story competition that produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The Vampyre by John Polidori is only about 20 pages long but those 20 pages changed vampire stories completely by introducing the romantic vampire into the literary world.

The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre by Chris Baldick