 Polidori first received the base of his story from Byron's unfinished story Fragment of a Story, which had been conceived and written in haste during a rainy weekend spent at Byron's with Mary Shelley, her husband (Percy Bysshe Shelley), Polidori, and Byron in which the four challenged each other to write a ghost story and from the romantically fueled words of Byron, the eternal demon of blood lust first emerged from the spoken tales of Eastern European myth and onto the written pages of English literature.Polidori then grounded his novel in Byron's work and fashioned out of Byron's sophisticated and yet queer character, the vampire, as the beginning of what gothic literature characterized as the devilishly veiled noblemen.Planche then adapted Polidori's character and in a theatrical innovation, made him walk the histrionic boards cloaked in the noble façade of Lord Ruthven emerging from the grotesque form the European myth had formerly placed on him.