The summer of 1816 was meant to be a holiday. It became the birthplace of modern horror.

Trapped indoors by weeks of relentless rain near Lake Geneva, a group of four brilliant minds: Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin (later Shelley), and John Polidori, amused themselves by reading German ghost stories. Challenged by Byron to each write a tale of the supernatural, their creative contest unlocked a darkness that would change literature forever.

This collection captures the complete, chilling literary output of that legendary gathering at the Villa Diodati:

• Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstone Shelley: The seminal masterpiece of an ambitious scientist, Victor Frankenstein, whose attempt to usurp the power of creation results in a tragic, terrifying monster.


• The Vampyre by John Polidori: The first modern vampire story in English, introducing the cold, aristocratic, and seductive Lord Ruthven--the prototype for the vampire as a sophisticated predator.


• A Fragment of a Novel by Lord Byron: Byron's initial, unfinished prose fragment that directly inspired Polidori's The Vampyre.


• Fragment of a Ghost Story by Percy Bysshe Shelley: A tantalising, haunting glimpse into the poet's own attempt at a tale of the macabre.

Explore the stories born in the shadow of a volcanic winter, where a game of imagination spiraled into an obsession with life, death, and the monstrous ambition of man.