Few creatures of horror have seized readers΄ imaginations and held them for so long as the anguished monster of Mary Shelley΄s Frankenstein.

The story of Victor Frankenstein΄s terrible creation and the havoc it caused has enthralled generations of readers and inspired countless writers of horror and suspense. Considering the gothic novel΄s enduring success, it is remarkable that it began merely as a whim of Lord Byron΄s.

"We will each write a story," Byron announced to his next-door neighbors, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her lover, the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.