It was a dark and stormy night in a gloomy castle in the year 1816.… 

[No kidding! I’m not making this up!! Okay, let’s try that again….]

It was a dark and stormy night in a gloomy castle in the year 1816, when the two of the greatest poets in England, their personal physician, and the abducted child bride of one of the poets, sat around the fire all night trying to top each other inventing the most horrific stories they could think of….

[Honest to God! It really happened!! No bullshit!!!]

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the poets. For 200 years they have been universally recognized as major figures in the art of words. But, on this night, they were left in the dust by the doctor and the teenager. And, ironically, when their tomes have literally turned to dust, the work of that young girl will still be remembered, read, filmed and gamed.

The poets were Lord Byron [whose contribution to this fearful night was a fragment of a story, "Fragment of a Novel“] and Percy Bysshe Shelley [whose "A Fragment of a Ghost Story" was his result].

The last man was Dr. John Polidari, author of “The Vampyre”, who created the first English Gothic depiction of the imaginary sub-species of human now currently undergoing an irrational craze in popular culture. [If you want to sure to sell your book nowadays, make it about immortal bloodsuckers!]

Ah, but the kid! What a kid!!!

Mary, nee Wollstonecraft, was daughter of two of the greatest radical thinkers of the time: Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft and John Godwin. Brought up in a what would now be called ultraliberal environment, shocked England by home wrecking the marriage of their favorite poet, and ran off with him to Europe. There, the events of that fateful night created the first truly modern “science fiction” book, first of a long line of modern “monster” novels: basically a whole new genre that broke the mold of “Gothic” fiction and though rarely read in its original form, has a grip on our consciousness that will never let go. A “monster” that every single person in Western culture is familiar with. Her story?

“FRANKENSTEIN” !!!

Of course, Frankenstein is not the “monster”! Frankenstein is the mad scientist who creates the monster.

The crazed surgeon cobbles together the inhuman Golem with bits and pieces of corpses and animates the carcass with a bolt of electric lightning, where it goes out and destroys everything it touches.

In the book, the creature dies, but in our culture, it will never die. It’s too important! The very idea of a living embodiment of the fear of science has become a fundamental archetype. “Godzilla”, “Brainiac”, etc., are so ubiquitous as to actually be loved [but, hopefully not emulated!].

It WAS a dark and stormy night…..

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