Publisher's Synopsis
In May 1816, a small group of weary travellers gathered at a villa on the banks of Lake Geneva, Italy. The eclectic group consisted of poet Percy Shelley, his 18-year old mistress Mary, their four-month-old son William, Mary's step-sister Clare Clairmont, Lord Byron, and the latter's personal physician, John Polidori. To relieve the boredom, and to foster some healthy competition between the rival poets, Lord Byron suggested that each member of the group produce a ghost story. This half-hearted idea was to change the entire landscape of horror fiction forever. Mary Shelley began working on what would later become known as Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, one of the most enduring tales ever told. In addition, John Polidori came up with a Gothic masterpiece called The Vampyre, based in part on a fragment of one of Byron's stories, which would go on to influence Bram Stoker's Dracula and numerous other seminal works. Both novels are presented here in their originally published form, along with Darkness by Lord Byron, which is also highly likely to have been a product of that haunted summer.
