The Monsters

On a gloomy night in 1816, as a storm brewed on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the famed English poet Lord Byron challenged his friends to a contest -- to write a ghost story. The famous result of that night was Mary Shelley's breathtaking novel Frankenstein, which appeared in print two years later and has retained its hold on the popular imagination for almost two centuries. Less known was John William Polidori's work, the first vampire novel. And the evening also begat a curse: within a few years of Frankenstein's publication, nearly all of those involved met untimely deaths. The…