Tales of the Dead

[Countess]

Fantasmagoriana has a significant place in the history of English literature. In the summer of 1816 Lord Byron and John William Polidori were staying at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva and were visited by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Claire Clairmont. Kept indoors by the "incessant rain" of that "wet, ungenial summer", over three days in June the five turned to reading fantastical stories, including Fantasmagoriana (in the French edition), and then devising their own tales. Mary Shelley produced what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus and Polidori was inspired by a fragmentary story of Byron's to produce The Vampyre, the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre. Some parts of Frankenstein are surprisingly similar to those found in Fantasmagoriana and suggest a direct influence upon Mary Shelley's writing.

Translated from French here:

http://www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/knarf/EtAlia/tdtp.html

[Arkady]

Wonderful! I knew the story of Byron and the challenge at Lake Geneva during 'the year without a summer'. I have wanted to read what could inspire such stories as Frankenstein and The Vampyre. Thank you for the link.

[MGK]

palahniuk wrote a book about the villa diodati, haunted