The Vampyre's Witching Hour: Descent into Darkness

In Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva, five friends join together during a particularly bleak summer of 1816. Doctor John Polidori, Lord George Gordon Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Percy Shelley, and Claire Clairmont engage in a contest to see which one of them will be able to write the best occult story. Mary wins.Unfortunately, John is bitten by Lord Byron's pet monkey, Mungo and begins to experience a blood lust he struggles to resist.Soon, Doctor Polidori must flee from his friends when Claire, bitten by him, discovers what John has become. Eventually, the physician winds up in the slums of Edinburgh but gains a teaching position at the university, impersonating Dr. Alexander Monro Tertius, a young professor of anatomy.Taking on an assistant in the laboratory as well as at his home in Charlotte Square, John hopes to escape his curse long enough to romance a young schoolmistress from a nearby village.Although God or Satan seems to conspire to keep John in the grips of the powerful witching hour that belongs to Hell rather than to Heaven, unbeknownst to Polidori, Mary Godwin Shelley and Lady Claire Clairmont Byron have been searching for him, determined to either save his humanity or, if not possible, destroy the vampyre. Read more