The weather went from being beautiful to tempestuous: torrential thunderstorms plagued the Shelleys, Byron and Polidori. The weather -- along with the company and the eerie ambiance of the locale -- contributed to the genesis of _Frankenstein, _ Polidori's "The Vampyre," and, in all likelihood, modern weird fiction. On the night of June 16th, the group read aloud a collection of German ghost stories, _The Fantasmagoriana._ This inspired Byron to challenge the group to write a ghost story. Shelley wrote an forgettable story; Byron wrote a story fragment; and Polidori began the "The Vampyre," the first modern vampire tale. The work is often viewed as the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre of fantasy fiction. The work is described by Christopher Frayling as "the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre.