The first vampire short story and novella, which came before Dracula, together in one Penguin Classics hardcover, a Penguin Speculative Fiction Special, with a foreword by #1 New York Times–bestselling author V. E. Schwab A Penguin Classic Hardcover In the summer of 1816, a group of friends—Lord Byron, his physician, John Polidori, Byron’s lover, Claire Clairmont, Claire’s step-sister, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Mary’s partner, Percy Bysshe Shelley—held a ghost story contest to pass the time at gloomy Villa Diodati, near Lake Geneva. The famous writing challenge led to both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1818). Featuring Lord Ruthven, a deathly pale and handsome nobleman who preys on women of high society, The Vampyre is generally identified as the first full-length vampire story in English literature and the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre of fantasy fiction. Carmilla (1872) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is a nineteenth-century Gothic novella featuring a protagonist who became the original prototype for a long line of female and lesbian vampires in literature, movies, television series, and more. In a castle deep in the Austrian forest, Laura, a young woman, leads an isolated life with her ailing father. A horse-drawn carriage crashes and an unexpected guest, the mysterious and seductive Carmilla, enters their lives. The original vampire novel of modern Europe, Carmilla predates Dracula by more than twenty-five years and the film Nosferatu by more than fifty.