Something rather incredible happens if you look at the so called “Satanic” school of literature. A small handful of creative writers, with beliefs that flew in the face of their contemporary victorian society, got together and wrote horror stories. Thus we have the birth of, for instance, the well known Frankenstein story.
A link you’re almost certainly unaware of, however, is that Shelley’s close companion Lord Byron can be considered the father of the Vampire legend.
The vampire or revenant first appeared in poems such as The Vampire (1748) by Heinrich August Ossenfelder, Lenore (1773) by Gottfried August Bürger, Die Braut von Corinth (The Bride of Corinth (1797) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), John Stagg’s “The Vampyre” (1810), Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Spectral Horseman” (1810) (“Nor a yelling vampire reeking with gore”) and “Ballad” in St. Irvyne (1811) about a reanimated corpse, Sister Rosa, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished Christabel and Lord Byron’s The Giaour.[151]
Byron was also credited with the first prose fiction piece concerned with vampires: The Vampyre (1819). However this was in reality authored by Byron’s personal physician, John Polidori, who adapted an enigmatic fragmentary tale of his illustrious patient, “Fragment of a Novel” (1819), also known as “The Burial: A Fragment”.[30][145]
Byron’s own dominating personality, mediated by his lover Lady Caroline Lamb in her unflattering roman-a-clef, Glenarvon (a Gothic fantasia based on Byron’s wild life), was used as a model for Polidori’s undead protagonist Lord Ruthven. The Vampyre was highly successful and the most influential vampire work of the early 19th century.[9]
Varney the Vampire was a landmark popular mid-Victorian era gothic horror story by James Malcolm Rymer (alternatively attributed to Thomas Preskett Prest), which first appeared from 1845 to 1847 in a series of pamphlets generally referred to as penny dreadfuls because of their inexpensive price and typically gruesome contents. The story was published in book form in 1847 and runs to 868 double-columned pages. It has a distinctly suspenseful style, using vivid imagery to describe the horrifying exploits of Varney.[149]
Another important addition to the genre was Sheridan Le Fanu’s lesbian vampire story Carmilla (1871). Like Varney before her, the vampire Carmilla is portrayed in a somewhat sympathetic light as the compulsion of her condition is highlighted.[152]
No effort to depict vampires in popular fiction was as influential or as definitive as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).[153]
Its portrayal of vampirism as a disease of contagious demonic possession, with its undertones of sex, blood and death, struck a chord in Victorian Europe where tuberculosis and syphilis were common. The vampiric traits described in Stoker’s work merged with and dominated folkloric tradition, eventually evolving into the modern fictional vampire.
Something fascinating though; these writers, in creating a “monster” – turn him into a tragic hero. Rather than being evil or sin incarnate, he is unfortunate, sad, and draws readers’ sympathy… exactly like a character that was exceedingly influential to this group – the fallen, tragic character of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost.
PS here’s a list of best vampire books.
If you’re stealing old monsters for modern fiction
That, to me, is the real lesson here: monsters survive because writers keep giving them new emotional jobs. The vampire lasts not because of fangs, but because he can be tragic, seductive, diseased, aristocratic, cursed, lonely, erotic, and spiritually rotten all at once. Good horror keeps mutating the symbol.
If you want better models for dark atmosphere and tension, this collection of scary stories to tell in the dark is a solid reminder that mood matters as much as lore. And if you’re pulling from folklore instead of Victorian gothic, the piece on the wendigo is a good example of how a creature becomes memorable when the mythology is tied to hunger, fear, and consequence instead of just costume.
