In the early 1800s, young British aristocrat Aubrey travels through Italy and Greece with the mercurial and fantastic Lord Ruthven. Later, when Ruthven returns from the dead to prey on his sister, Aubrey realizes that the enigmatic stranger is a vampire.

Many of the earliest and most interesting vampire stories, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

John William Polidori (1795-1821) was, for a brief period, the personal physician to Lord Byron. Half Italian, he was the uncle of the Rossetti siblings, and it was William Michael Rossetti, in his role as family recorder, who published Polidori's manuscript diary after nearly a century, in 1911. This account of his time with Byron (which ended two months later when they quarrelled and parted company) is the only contemporary account of the few weeks, crucial to the development of the Romantic movement, during which Mary Shelley's Frankenstein arose from a storytelling competition at the...

La leggendaria figura del vampiro e molto antica, radicata in culture diversissime tra loro e spesso con caratteristiche diverse a seconda dei casi (come vediamo, per esempio, dai primi due racconti qui presentati, dove nessun vampiro si fa problemi a esporsi alla luce del sole), l'unico punto che tutti i vampiri hanno in comune tra loro e la tendenza a nutrirsi del sangue dei vivi, portandoli inevitabilmente alla distruzione. In questo libro sono raccolti quattro tra i piu antichi racconti sull'argomento: Il Vampiro, di John William Polidori, forse il primo a rappresentare la figura del...