In the summer of 1816 — later called the "Year Without a Summer" after a volcanic eruption wrecked the weather worldwide — a small group of writers got stuck indoors at the Villa Diodati on the shore of Lake Geneva. Lord Byron was renting the house, already Europe's most scandalous celebrity poet. Percy Bysshe Shelley, a radical young poet, had traveled there with Mary Godwin (not yet Mary Shelley — she and Percy would marry later that year) and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, who had arranged the whole trip because she was pursuing Byron. Byron's personal physician, John Polidori, came along too. Nearby, at Coppet, the exiled writer and salon host Germaine de Staël was running her own influential intellectual circle.

Trapped by endless rain, Byron proposed a ghost-story contest. Eighteen-year-old Mary produced the germ of Frankenstein. Polidori, working from a Byron fragment, wrote The Vampyre — often credited as the first vampire novel in English, and the direct ancestor of Dracula and everything after it. Find out which one of them you actually are.