In May 1816, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, Dr. John Polidori, and Claire Clairmont, Mary's stepsister and Byron's lover, gathered at Villa Diodati, near Geneva.
There, influenced by a book of ghost stories, they decided to have a writing competition to create similar narratives. The competition quickly failed, but it resulted in the most fruitful failure in the history of fantasy literature, as it gave birth to two archetypal horror stories of modern times: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Polidori's The Vampyre, based on an idea by Byron.

The book that had impressed them so much was the English translation of a French anthology, which in turn was based on a more extensive German work. This English version, which even included an original text, was never reissued, just like its French counterpart, until 1992, when it was made available by mail order from the English Gothic Society. This Greek translation, first published in 2003, is the first worldwide presence of the anthology in bookstores since 1813.