ABSTRACT
The vampire stories were far from peaceful and written in a far from peaceful atmosphere. In 1816, once Lord Byron , John Polidori, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft and Claire Claremont were established at the Villa Diodati and the small house nearby, they got into a routine of soirees and rowing. In one letter to John Murray, Byron described a stormy night in which Shelley, who could not swim, kept his calm when the boat seemed about to capsize and refused Byron's offer to save him should he fall in the water. Byron's story "A Fragment" influenced Polidori deeply, and in one letter Polidori called his vampire 'a development' of it. Byron's hero is never given a name and was young and innocent. Quickly Byron lands his two characters in Smyrna in Turkey. Augustus Darvell is not happy and suffers "an oppression on his mind," which gets worse as they travel through marshes, passing forlorn huts and some abandoned mosques.
