What do you think of this fact?
Picture this: your summer vacation gets completely rained out. You’re stuck in a house with friends, thunderstorms outside, boredom inside. Someone suggests writing ghost stories. That’s exactly how “Frankenstein” began in 1816. Its author, Mary Shelley, was 18 years old at the time.
A volcano ruins summer
The terrible weather came from a volcano on the other side of the planet. In April 1815, Mount Tambora erupted on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa. Its ash spread high into the atmosphere and pushed temperatures down around the world.
The following year, 1816, went down in history as the “Year Without a Summer.” It snowed in New England in the middle of summer, and Europe got endless rain and storms. Mary Shelley later described it as a “wet, ungenial summer” that kept the group indoors.
The spooky nights at Villa Diodati
The house was Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, rented by the poet Lord Byron. His guests were Mary, still Mary Godwin back then, her future husband Percy Shelley, her stepsister Claire Clairmont and Byron’s personal doctor John Polidori.
Byron announced a contest: everyone had to write a ghost story. Mary struggled at first. By her own later account, the key idea came to her in a kind of dream: a scientist who brings something lifeless to life, and is then horrified by his own creation.
That idea grew into a full novel. “Frankenstein” was published in 1818 and is now a classic of horror fiction and one of the earliest science fiction novels ever.
The contest produced a second monster: John Polidori wrote “The Vampyre.” It’s one of literature’s early vampire tales and later influenced Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.”
One bad summer, a house full of bored poets and an 18-year-old with nightmares: that’s all it took to create two of pop culture’s biggest monsters.