Written & Edited by Matt Dorff
Illustrations by David Seidman
In the summer of 1816, an extraordinary gathering took place on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Mary Shelley), Claire Clairmont, and Dr. John Polidori found themselves together in a rented villa during a week of rainy days and stormy nights. In the evenings they entertained each other by making up ghost stories, one of which evolved into the novel “Frankenstein” and another into the first published vampire story in western literature, “The Vampyre.”
My inspiration for this graphic novel came from speculating on these first oral tellings, as well as the tales told by the other three people present. Renowned horror illustrator David Seidman captured the gothic atmospherics as well as the emotional nuances of five narratives that imagined the origins of serial killers, werewolves, and sea monsters in addition to Frankenstein and vampires.
