Frankenstein

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 novel`s enduring success, it is remarkable that it began merely as a whim of Lord Byron`s.

`We will each write a ghost story`, Byron announced to his next-door neighbors, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley. The friends were summering on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland in 1816, Shelley still unknown as a poet, Byron writing the third canto of `Childe Harold`. When continual rains kept them confined indoors, all agreed to Byron`s proposal.

The illustrious poets failed to complete their ghost stories. But Mary Shelley rose supremely to the challenge. With `Frankenstein`, she succeeded admirably in the task she set for herself: to create a story that, in her own words, `would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror - one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart