Author(s): Benjamin Markovits

Fiction

Having been dismissed from Lord Byron's service, Dr John Polidori had fallen on hard times. Three years earlier he had accompanied the poet on a tour of the continent, Poladori had held literary ambitions and wanted to test his talents against the greatest writer of his age. That summer had become famous in literary history, Byron and Shelley met and grew into friends, Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein". And now a young woman mistakes the doctor for the poet. As the pair fall in love, Polidori knows that he can only emerge from Byron's shadow if he confesses his true identity to the deluded girl; but was it only Byron's shadow that led her to love him in the first place? And a ghost story, "The Vampyre", is published under Byron's name, but will the truth of the matter be uncovered?