The Vampyre cover art

The Vampyre

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends December 16, 2025 11:59pm GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

The Vampyre

By: John Polidori
Narrated by: B.J. Harrison
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends December 16, 2025 11:59pm GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £1.99

Buy Now for £1.99

Only £0.99 a month for the first 3 months. Pay £0.99 for the first 3 months, and £8.99/month thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Start my membership

About this listen

Young, impressionable Aubrey is fascinated by the enigmatic Lord Ruthven, and accompanies him on a tour to Europe. But Aubrey develops a growing distaste for Lord Ruthven’s sinister and grotesque conduct - especially as it concerns human blood.

This novella, penned during that tempestuous night in Switzerland amongst such notables as Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley, served as the great inspiration for Bram Stoker to create Dracula. Discover the roots of vampirism in literature with award-winning narrator B. J. Harrison.

Public Domain (P)2009 B.J. Harrison Anthologies Anthologies & Short Stories Classics Drama & Plays European World Literature

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Frankenstein cover art
The Monk cover art
Dracula cover art
The Monk cover art
Slayers: A Buffyverse Story cover art
Fledgling cover art
The Mortal Immortal cover art
The Count of Monte Cristo (Dramatized) cover art
Six of Crows cover art
The Bondwoman's Narrative cover art
Dracula's Guest cover art
Vintage Vampire Stories cover art
The Werewolf of Paris cover art
Tales of Mystery and Imagination cover art
The Moonlit Road and Other Stories cover art
Two on a Tower cover art
All stars
Most relevant
Having listened to Dracula by Bram Stoker, I wanted to find out something of the origin of vampire stories. (Bram Stoker seems to assume that we already know what vampires are.) As I understand it, this book was one of the very first vampire books and very influential at the time.
The writing style of 1819 is a little hard to follow, but still quite listenable as read by BJ Harrison. I checked my understanding of the story afterwards by looking it up in Wikipedia.
From internet researches, I believe that this was the first vampire story to be written as prose, in English, although the concept of vampires seems to go back a lot further.

Original Vampire Story(?)

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Harrison does the best reading you could want of this short novel, and probably a lot better than the prose deserves. Harrison breathes life in to the long sentences and longer paragraphs so that the story remains dramatic and vivid, rather than dense and wordy.

if you want to make sense of this important early vampire story, and you find the text by itself hard going, then you will appreciate this reading.

As good as you would want

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The narration is completely on par for this kind of story! It is a short one but definitely worth a listen.

Classic tale

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.