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The Vampyre

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The Vampyre

By: John Polidori
Narrated by: B.J. Harrison
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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
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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(?)

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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

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The narration is completely on par for this kind of story! It is a short one but definitely worth a listen.

Classic tale

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