It is nearly midnight, and it is June, and there is a fire lit — in June — because this is the coldest, strangest summer anyone alive can remember.
You are a guest in a rented villa above Lake Geneva. Rain has hammered the windows for days. Lightning keeps ripping the sky over the Jura mountains, and the candles gutter every time thunder rolls down the lake. On the table: a book of German ghost stories. Around the fire: the most scandalous house party in Europe.
There is Lord Byron, twenty-eight, the most famous poet alive, who fled England one step ahead of the gossip. His young doctor, John Polidori, twenty, scribbling in his diary. The radical poet Percy Shelley, twenty-three. Claire Clairmont, eighteen, who arranged this whole rendezvous. And beside you, quiet, watchful, missing nothing: Mary Godwin. Eighteen years old.
Byron closes the book of ghost stories, looks around the firelight, and says the sentence that will change literature forever:
“We will each write a ghost story.”
Before this week is out, two monsters will be born in this room: the creature we call Frankenstein's, and the modern vampire. But to understand why everyone is trapped indoors, you have to go back fourteen months — and eleven thousand kilometres east.
In April 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted — the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history. It threw so much sulfur into the stratosphere that it dimmed the sun around the entire planet. Drag the slider to follow the ash from the eruption to Mary's rainy window, month by month.
Mount Tambora, on the island of Sumbawa, detonates with a roar heard 2,600 km away. It is the largest eruption in recorded history.
A volcano in Indonesia, a monster in Geneva: the longest chain of cause and effect in literary history.
The fire is lit, the storm is raging, and the ghost-story challenge hangs in the air. Click each figure — and the book on the table — to learn who they are and what this night will do to them.
Click a silhouette to meet a guest.
Five people are gathered against the storm. Between them, they will produce two of the most influential monsters ever imagined — and this is the strangest part — neither monster will come from the famous poets.
Days pass. Everyone else has a story going. Mary has nothing — and each morning they ask, mortifyingly: “Have you thought of a story?” Then one night, unable to sleep, she has what she later called a waking dream:
“I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together…”
She remembered one detail with total precision: moonlight forcing its way through her closed shutters. In 2010, astronomer Donald Olson of Texas State University used that single clue to date the birth of Frankenstein to one night. Toggle between the two candidate nights and see what the moon was doing:
June 16: a bright gibbous moon has just climbed over the Cologny hillside — high and brilliant enough to blaze through the shutter slats, exactly as Mary described. Olson's team concluded her waking dream happened between 2 and 3 a.m. on June 16, 1816. A novel with a birth certificate, signed by the moon.
Why did Mary's nightmare feel possible? Because in 1816, the hottest question in science was whether electricity was the force of life itself. Luigi Galvani had made dead frogs' legs kick with a spark. In 1803 his nephew Giovanni Aldini went further — at Newgate Prison in London, he applied a battery to the body of an executed man, George Forster. The jaw quivered. An eye opened. A fist clenched and rose. The audience was horrified. The Shelleys had discussed exactly these experiments.
Hold the button to charge the voltaic pile and send a spark through the frog's leg, just as Galvani did in the 1780s:
Mary's genius: she never explains the science. The famous line is only that Victor “infused a spark of being into the lifeless thing.” She left the lightning bolts and neck-bolts to the movies — which is why the book has never gone out of date.
Published anonymously on January 1, 1818 — just 500 copies. Many reviewers assumed a man (probably Percy) wrote it. It is now widely considered the first true science-fiction novel.
In 2021 a first edition sold for $1.17 million — a record price for a printed work by a woman.
Byron abandoned his ghost story after a few pages. His young doctor picked up the idea and made the vampire an elegant, seductive aristocrat — the first vampire tale in English prose (1819).
Without Polidori's Lord Ruthven, no Dracula (1897), no vampire fiction as we know it.
That sunless summer, Byron wrote an apocalyptic poem that begins: “I had a dream, which was not all a dream. / The bright sun was extinguish'd…”
Readers thought it fantasy. It was the weather report.
— Mary Shelley, introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein
A volcano no one in Geneva had heard of cancelled their summer. A rainy week trapped five restless minds in one room. A dare, a sleepless night, a moonbeam through the shutters — and an eighteen-year-old invented a genre.
The next time bad weather ruins your plans, ask yourself: what is the storm giving you time to imagine?