The author who invented the vampire story thought he was being funny.

"The Vampyre," first published anonymously in 1819, was taken to be the work of the famous poet (and early 19th-century equivalent of a tabloid celebrity) Lord Byron, but turned out to be by Byron's personal physician (and devoted hanger-on), Dr. John Polidori.

Its plot nugget was by Byron, in an uncompleted story dashed off for that ghost-story competition Mary Shelley (then Mary Godwin) won with Frankenstein, but Polidori worked it up into something publishable which, nearly two centuries on, remains smart, tart and readable.

In "The Vampyre," the narrator (a stand-in for Polidori) falls in with a mysterious aristocrat, Lord Ruthven, who is dressed in black, unnaturally pale, returns from apparent death when exposed to moonlight and is revealed in the last line (as he is snacking on the narrator's sister) to be a vampire.

Ruthven is, of course, a caricature of Byron, at once fond and biting, and the poet was equivocal about the depiction of his public image – which wasn't even the worst fictional version of him floating about, since his ex-lover Lady Caroline Lamb had written a whole novel about what a bastard he was, Glenarvon.

Byron got especially testy when people told him "The Vampyre" was the best thing he had ever written.

Boiled down, "The Vampyre" is like those cartoons that show a current hate figure with fangs – in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher was frequently thus caricatured.

Previously, vampires had been creatures of folklore, featuring in many cultures around the world, and the anecdotes about them collected by obsessives like Dom Augustin Calmet and Montague Summers were mostly about smelly peasant revenants who seem more like our present idea of a zombie.

Polidori, who was making the point that his friend Byron sometimes acted like a callous, blood-sucking monster, dressed up the fiend in smart clothes, gave him a title (there was a real Lord Ruthven at the time, but he didn't sue) and set him loose as a predator in high society.

There was a subsequent vampire craze, which included plays and an opera derived from "The Vampyre," expanded French translations and sequels (including one by Alexander Dumas) and a lurid penny dreadful imitation that hastened through dozens of installments chronicling the adventures of Varney the Vampire (1847). Even the next significant vampire story, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1871), in which the monster is a pale, passive-aggressive teenage girl, evokes "The Vampyre" as the title character latches onto successive well-off families like a cuckoo in the nest and drains the daughters. Le Fanu added the stake through the heart and other elements that have accrued to the genre – and played up the ambiguous sexiness of night-time bedroom biting scenes.

All this was prologue, of course.

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) is the big beast of vampire fiction. It's considerably more than an expanded rewrite of "The Vampyre" – one element it adds to the vampire image is foreignness: Lord Ruthven is English, Count Dracula is a Middle European barbarian, a threat to home and maidenhood, who crawls out of his Transylvanian fastness and moves in next door.

Though the book has picked up a period, nostalgic patina redolent of cobblestones, gaslight and Sherlock Holmes, it was originally an up-to-the-minute techno-thriller with railway timetables and shipping reports and talk of radium deposits in the Carpathians as a secret origin for vampirism.

Its villain is a brutal atavism – archenemy Dr. Van Helsing talks about Dracula's "child brain" – but he comes to the contemporary London of the original readers and strives to master the modern world.

In stage and film versions, Dracula picked up some of Lord Ruthven's dress sense – Stoker's book insists on how badly dressed the Count is, but Draculas from Bela Lugosi through Christopher Lee to Gary Oldman have been cloak-swishing, natty style icons – and successive versions have given this blood-rapist more romantic polish.

Since Dracula, vampire fiction has evolved – but the spectre of Stoker's Count stands behind all subsequent bloodsuckers.

Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1953) – recently anointed Best Vampire Novel of the Century by the Horror Writers Association – is a science-fiction take, rationalizing vampirism in terms of a blood disease, and following the logical assumption that if all vampire victims become vampires, then they will multiply exponentially and overwhelm the Earth, whereupon ordinary humans with their wooden stakes will be seen as the legendary monsters that stalk the day.

Matheson not only came up with a fresh vampire story, but laid the groundwork for the current proliferation of zombie apocalypses, as his everyman protagonist is besieged in his suburban home by former neighbors howling for his blood.

Stephen King's "'Salem's Lot" (1975) reworks the premise of Dracula, updating the setting to small-town America. And Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire (1975) allows the vampire the voice Stoker denied him (everyone in Dracula keeps copious diaries, but Dracula just scribbles one or two notes).

It also raises the possibility that vampires might be tormented, soul-searching, not-altogether-evil, glamorous and complicated characters. Rice's successive books become more and more weighted down with crankiness and fudge, but without her, vampires would have died out – there are only so many ways of retelling the story of Dracula.

Currently, thanks to the weird subcategory of vampire romance (which descends from Rice's chronicles), Dracula-type, blood-drinking bastards are almost endangered, though even the weediest blunt-fanged sparkly vamp seems to have a thoroughly nasty (and, it has to be said, sexier and more exciting) brother, ex-lover, archenemy or doppelganger hanging about to keep the plot interesting.

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Kim Newman is the author of the Anno Dracula series, published by Titan. Anno Dracula and Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron are already out; Anno Dracula: Dracula Cha Cha Cha and Anno Dracula: Johnny Alucard are forthcoming.