In May of 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin traveled with her future husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, to Lake Geneva, Switzerland. There, they visited the exiled poet Lord Byron, as well as his doctor and companion Dr. John Polidori, at an estate called the Villa Diodati. The companions spent many hours in conversation, including evenings spent around the campfire telling ghost stories. During one of these story-telling sessions Lord Byron suggested a contest wherein each member of the group would write an original supernatural tale. This volume contains the fruit of that contest, including Mary Shelley's and John Polidori's seminal works, Frankenstein and The Vampyre, as well as unfinished works by Percy Shelley and Lord Byron.