Fangs for the memories: The A-Z of vampires

From Independent UK ( this is great fun )

Once upon a time, they were monsters to be feared. But nowadays, they are cool, sexy creatures with great hair and killer cheekbones – and what’s more, they’re everywhere...Kevin Jackson gets his teeth into the A-Z of vampires

A is for Aristocrat

These days, the word "vampire" is likely to summon up images of a brooding high-school boy with killer cheekbones (Robert Pattinson in the Twilight films), or a macho Southern dude with killer cheekbones (Stephen Moyer in True Blood), or a beautiful young athlete with killer cheekbones (Kate Beckinsale in the Underworld movies, or Sarah Michelle Geller in the Buffy TV series). But for most of the past 200 years, the word evoked a tall, dark gentleman with exquisite manners (when he wasn't tearing open your jugular) and some highly desirable real estate. In short, the vampire was the aristocrat of monsters, the toff of terror. This would have seemed a bizarre idea to even earlier generations, for whom the vampire was a brutish and repellent thing, more like the zombies of our cinematic folklore than most of the vampires we know and half-love. What changed the creature of rotting rags and still more rotten flesh into the suave, elegant stalker of grand houses? Answer: the late Romantics, and one in particular, which is why ...

B is for Byron
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Britain has been the home of vampire myths for more than eight centuries – the tale of the Alnwick vampire dates from the 12th century – but the creature only enters English literature in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in poems by Coleridge ("Christabel"), Southey and Byron. And it was Byron who wrote the very first vampire story in our literature, albeit a brief one. Byron jotted it down during the notorious "Haunted Summer" of 1816, when he lodged at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva with Shelley and others; it was this same sojourn which later inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. Byron's fragment was picked up, adapted and developed by his personal doctor, John Polidori, who published this longer tale as The Vampyre – and the floodgates opened. The Vampyre was a best-seller across Europe, and particularly in France, where it was widely believed not only that Byron was the author, but that it was autobiographical.

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