some terrible idea
No other account of the writing contest verifies this bizarre project as
Mary Shelley outlines it. Polidori himself, in the introduction
to his realistic novel Ernestus Berchtold; or, the Modern Oedipus
(1819), identified that work
as the one he began as the response to the challenge given by Lord Byron. He did, however, also produce a
horror-story of his own in direct competition with Byron's unfinished fragment, which he published in 1819 as The Vampyre; a Tale.
