Back to the haunted summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva. This time we will focus on 19-year-old Mary Godwin, soon-to-be Shelley. How does she come to us through the lens of popular culture? We'll examine one impish attempt to fool the censors in 1935, and the extravagant imaginations of Ken Russell and Stephen Volk in 1986. Enjoy!

Quite possibly the most famous detective story of them all, The Hound of the Baskervilles, has at its centre a ghostly hound. Why has this idea had such resonance for the reading public, for filmmakers and dramatists since the story's emergence in 1902? We'll take a look at Arthur Conan Doyle's story, his influences, and the underlying legends of avenging hell hounds such as Black Shuck.

The haunted summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva has gone into legend. The ghost story contest between friends spawned not just one but two enduring myths of the horror genre -- John Polidori's The Vampyre and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein . But what of Byron, a man whose lifestyle was as potent as material for fantasy as any fiction? Well, he did begin a tale, one that, if finished, might have changed the whole course of the nascent genre of supernatural literature. In this first of a new series, we'll discuss one of the great "what ifs" of the history of horror.