A review by larkspire
The Vampyre by John William Polidori

3.0

This is a very good little gothic horror, excellently written (for the most part) and about as tense as most of its contemporaries are. Dracula is tenser, but of course it would be hard to believe that Stoker wasn't taking notes from Poridori (or at least from the same people Poridori took notes from, since The Vampyre was only the first English vampire story).

For the first vampire story published in English, this was much newer to me than I expected. Frankly, I wasn't expecting to enjoy it as much as I did; I anticipated adding an extra star purely to recognise the story's innovations/uniqueness for its time, rather than just because I liked reading it. But I enjoyed it quite a lot, and it definitely scratched that gothic itch. The limited amount of blood-sucking and increased focus on the horror, or at least the eeriness, of the vampire as a functioning person in society was novel to me too, and very effective. Fans of Anne Rice, Richelle Mead, and L.J. Smith might feel differently.

Spoiler

The last paragraph, though? The last paragraph reads like a joke. So much tension was built and "she had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!" had the opposite of the effect that I'm assuming the author was going for. Leaving it vaguer, or even just toning it down and wording it slightly differently would have made the whole thing much creepier, in my opinion. But maybe I'm just ruined by creepypasta and shitposts, unlike the reading audiences of the time.