*1816 was called “The Year Without A Summer.”
In the weird darkness of that July’s volcanic winter, Mary Wollestonecraft Godwin began writing Frankenstein on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. But that is not where Frankenstein began.
A few months earlier, en route through Germany to Switzerland, Mary, her future husband Percy Shelley, and her stepsister Clair Clairmont approached a strange castle. Some say they passed it by. Some say they came upon it at night and saw nothing.
Castle Frankenstein, some one hundred years earlier, had been home to Johann Conrad Dippel—a theologian, a writer, and that region’s most notorious alchemist. His experiments included the independent invention of nitroglycerin, a distillation of the elixir of life… and the transfer of a live soul into an awful accretion of human body parts.
Mary enters the castle on her own. So it’s only Mary who finds Dippel’s tower: the place where he worked, the place where he was born, the place where he signed his letters Frankensteinensis—Born in Frankenstein. And she finds something haunting the tower.
This weird spectre leads Mary through past and future—the history of alchemy and the strange story of Johann Dippel, and the events to come in Mary’s own life, a litany of death and sorrow. *Source: avatarpress.com