Dreams of the Romantics: A Story Cycle

"Dreams of the Romantics" is a gothic story cycle about Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Dr John William Polidori, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The poetic circle gathered at Villa Diodati on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland; it was June-July 1816, during the fateful Year Without a Summer that followed the eruption of Mt Tambora near Bali which cast a pall over the earth. Mary Shelley, eighteen that year, later described "incessant rain" and "wet, ungenial" weather. Over one three-day stretch stuck indoors during inclement weather, Byron-who that same month would write his lacerating, apocalyptic poem "Darkness"-dared each of his friends to devise a gothic tale. His challenge resulted in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus" and Dr. Polidori's "The Vampyre," the first popular vampire story. Dreams of the Romantics will appeal to readers with a yen for spooky stories, and an interest in or curiosity about the lives of these immortal writers...