Bad luck and strange circumstances set the stage for literature’s most famous vacation gone wrong—unseasonably cold weather and steady rain, a guest list filled with big names and bigger egos, complicated relationships and unrequited love. Stuck indoors for days on end, the caravan that had gathered at the grand Villa Diodati in Geneva in that summer of 1816 read old ghost stories. None of the tales were all that good, their host declared; surely his circle of morbid-minded creatives could do better.

And so there was a friendly competition, born of boredom, that introduced not one but two legendary monsters into the cultural zeitgeist. With The Vampyre, John William Polidori popularized a mythic beast that would later inspire Bram Stoker. And with Frankenstein, Mary Shelley dreamed up

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