There are two great origin stories in the history of horror fiction. The first took place in Switzerland in 1816, but it began with a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world. Ash from Mount Tambora wrapped the planet in shade, leading to “the year without a summer” and forcing a rabble of Romantic poets inside their vacation home on the banks of Lake Geneva. Bored, they took to writing scary stories, and a nineteen-year-old woman wrote down a “tale that haunted [her] midnight pillow.” It became Frankenstein, which revolutionized horror, birthed science fiction, and ensured that Mary Shelley would forever reign as the queen of Gothic fiction.
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