In the summer of 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley visited Lord Byron at his villa by Lake Geneva. The eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 had cast a long volcanic winter, and the weather was not conducive to outdoor pursuits. Instead the companions amused themselves by reading ghost stories, and Byron challenged them to write their own. A terrifying nightmare inspired the eighteen-year-old Mary to write the tale that she would later expand into her classic novel ...