A broken heart. An infamous holiday gone wrong. A deadly curse brought to life. A holiday in Switzerland is supposed to lift Mary Wollstonecroft Godwin’s spirits. She wants to forget the past and have fun.

In fact, everyone in her party is running away from one indiscretion or another — from her fiancé Percy Shelley to Lord Byron to Mary’s stepsister, Claire.

But from the moment Mary arrives at Byron’s villa, she knows something is wrong. He rushes her indoors and forbids all of them to go out at night, claiming that the horrible weather has driven wild animals down from the mountains. The only person who doesn’t seem to be running away from anything is a handsome, young Italian doctor, John Polidori. Instead, he is fervently pursuing local folk legends and a new scientific theory that claims people can be raised from the dead. But it’s not until they all challenge one other to write ghost stories that the real danger begins. In a nightmare, Mary envisions a patchwork man animated by Galvanism and she begins writing Frankenstein.

Likewise, fueled by local legends, John writes The Vampyre — one of the first vampire stories ever written. What neither one of them knows is that they are conjuring a dark evil. Before long, all of their lives will be in danger — for neither of these characters are imaginary. Far from it.