Shrug at first bite.

[uvula_fr_b4]

I read John William Polidori's "The Vampyre" (written in 1816, though published in 1819) on my Kindle, via Project Gutenberg, from Monday, 11 March to Tuesday, 12 March. It may be the first (or one of the first; it depends on whether you're counting strictly prose stories or including poetry) vampire story in the English language, but it's rather

Comments

[marlowe1]

Dr. Polidori is my prime example of someone really not knowing where their talent lay. He could have been the greatest doctor of his era and instead he was a hack writer known primarily for writing a story that was basically libel against his boss.

[uvula_fr_b4]

Yeah, "hack" fits him pretty well; he also seems something of an early dress version of a "fan fic" writer, given that he couldn't be arsed to come up with a different name for his titular character than the one that one of his patient's ex-paramours came up with for her kiss-and-tell novel Glenarvon.

I note too that Polidori wrote "The Vampyre" the same year that Glenarvon was published, even if "The Vampyre" wasn't actually published until three years later.