\047Upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein: - to this the men pointed, crying, simultaneously struck with horror, "a Vampyre, a Vampyre!"\047 John Polidori\047s classic tale of the vampyre was a product of the same ghost-story competition that produced Mary Shelley\047s Frankenstein. Set in Italy, Greece, and London, Polidori\047s tales is a reaction to the dominating presence of his employer Lord Byron, and transformed the figure of the vampire from the bestial ghoul of earlier mythologies into the glamorous aristocrat whose violence and sexual allure make him literally a \047lady-killer\047. Polidori\047s tale introduced the vampire into English fiction, and launched a vampire craze that has never subsided. \047The Vampyre\047 was first published in 1819 in the London New Monthly Magazine.\012The present volume selects thirteen other tales of the macabre first published in the leading London and Dublin magazines between 1819 and 1838, including Edward Bulwer\047s chilling account of the doppelganger, Letitia Landon\047s elegant reworking of the Gothic romance, William Carleton\047s terrifying description of an actual lynching, and James Hogg\047s ghoulish exploitation of the cholera epidemic of 1831-2.