The Vampyre

The Vampyre is a short work of prose fiction by John William Polidori, published in 1819 and usually described as the first modern vampire story.

Aubrey meets Lord Ruthven at a London gathering and, flattered by the attention of a man everyone seems to know, accepts his company on a tour of Europe. He begins to notice that Ruthven is drawn to people on the edge of ruin, and that ruin follows wherever he goes; he sees it in Athens, where Ruthven takes an interest in a young woman Aubrey has come to care for. The story gives the vampire no fangs and no castle. Ruthven is a fashionable English aristocrat whose power is social as much as supernatural, and who is bound by an oath that Aubrey, to his cost, makes and cannot break. Polidori wrote it as part of the same competition that produced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, taking a fragment by Lord Byron and finishing it himself.

Its aristocratic, seductive vampire set the pattern that most vampire fiction has followed since.