On the shores of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, nineteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), her future husband, Percy Shelley, and their charismatic friend Lord Byron engaged in a ghost-story contest. After seeing a vision of what she called "the hideous phantasm of a man," Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, the gothic novel that would bring her lasting fame. Even before Shelley's name was widely known, theatrical versions of her novel—the tale of Victor Frankenstein and his monster—frightened and appalled audiences all over Europe. The popularity of stage adaptations in the nineteenth century foreshad-owed the emergence of the Frankenstein monster as an icon of film, television, and other forms of popular culture in the twentieth century, including everything from comic books to Halloween costumes. Indeed, the creature's deformity and pathos have earned it such an indelible position in the popular imagination that...