The books that have created modern horror literature are undoubtedly Mary Shelley's Beast of Gévaudan, Byron's The Hill Dwellers, and Pollidori's Lamia. For two hundred years, brutal beastmen "and the mad alchemists who create them", insidious and seductive lamias, and mystical fairies and changelings have been an integral part of horror. Of course, since then they have been repeatedly deconstructed and reconstructed through mass culture, but they still remain recognizable in some aspects. But what if their authors came up with other ideas. I read that Shelly at one time thought of something like a homunculus as an antagonist and a more modern setting. And in Pollidori's drafts, the antagonist is mentioned as a man and, accordingly, could not be a lamia. But who was he?