Rises the Night

Behind the Story

When I started researching vampires and vampire mythology, I learned to my surprise that not only are there vampire myths found in every culture in the world, but that our stereotypical vampire – the mysterious aristocrat who bites the necks of his victims – is a relatively new take on the myth and was first presented in The Vampyre.

The premise of The Vampyre was actually conceived by Lord Byron during a rainy summer in Switzerland. He and John Polidori, who was his private physician at the time, spent some time with Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Mary, and it was during one evening in Geneva that Mary Shelley proposed a challenge: that they each write a horror novel.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was the result of that contest, but also during that time, Byron started writing what was to become The Vampyre. He later became bored with it and Polidori asked if he could take the idea and write it himself, and Byron agreed. Interestingly enough, the main character of Polidori’s story, the vampire Lord Ruthven, is believed to have been based on Byron himself.

At any rate, as I was researching all of these interesting tidbits, I learned that John Polidori’s death – which occurred in 1821, only a few years after the publication of The Vampyre – was considered rather mysterious, and that in fact, there were various stories of the cause of death. Some said he was poisoned. Others said he ingested something purposely. One account even said he died in an accident (but that proved to be incorrect).

So I decided that he must have died because he knew too much about vampires, and to their dismay, he shared their secrets with the world! And that was the germ of the story for Rises the Night.