We have searched near and far to gather tales from a cross the land and mysterious ocean just for you. I am so glad you arrived here. In a time when pen and paper are a thing of the past, replaced by emails and text messages. When video games have taken over for the imagination.

We have for you food for thought. Go on a journey, raid tombs, travel across exotic jungles, drink water from a leaf in a tropical rain forest and ride a Dromedary Camel across the Arabian Desert in search of treasure, without ever leaving your room!

Would you prefer reading a great book over playing football? When all your friends are at the mall, do you simply want to hang out with Anne Rice? When everyone went to see Zodiac did you stay behind because you wanted to read the book by Robert Graysmith? When Great Expectations came out starring Ethan Hawk and Gwyneth Paltrow did you have to tell everyone that the film was based on a novel by Charles Dickens?

Do you know how one of the best Gothic novels came about? Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was written on a bet to see who could come up with the best ghost story. There is a great book written about this night called "The Monsters" by Dorothy Hoobler and Thomas Hoobler. The Hooblers theoriesed that there was a curse bestowed upon everyone in the villa on that creative summer night.

Interesting Facts about Mary Shelley 's Frankenstein:

It's the most famous "dark and stormy night" in literary history. Every English major knows the story of the June 17, 1816, house party at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, where five young English people playfully vied with one another to tell a ghost story. The soap-operatic cast of characters is irresistible. The charismatic leader of the group (and also the initiator of the contest) was Lord Byron, the foremost celebrity of the age, a bestselling poet, talented, handsome, rich, witty, titled, Byron had brought with him as paid companion a young doctor (Byron's erratic crash dieting sometimes endangered his health), John William Polidori, 21, who was also an aspiring litterateur. The third man of the group, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 23, was a decidedly radical (though always emotional) thinker who had recently begun to publish his own poetry.

Mary had what was to be known as a the most famous waking nightmare. On the night prior to this nightmare she had been invloved in a discussion about a subject from de Stael's De l'Allemagne: "whether the principle of life could be discovered and whether scientists could galvanize a corpse of manufactured humanoid".

Mary Shelley's account of her nightmare:

"I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life...His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away...hope that...this thing...would subside into dead matter...he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains..."

It was the next morning that Mary Shelley was ready to complete the task of writing one the best frightening stories ever told.

On this same night the birth of the Civilized vampire was created. With the vampire, Gothic scholars and serious horror fans know that the modern concept of the arrogant, elegant, moody, aristocratic, malicious, sensual predator who has come to seem the one true vampire was in fact invented by Polidori in The Vampyre, published in 1819, with its antihero modeled so obviously on Lord Byron as to invite a lawsuit. Folktales about vampires -- crude animalistic blood-suckers, not so different from werewolves -- had been around for centuries, but Polidori, whose talent Byron had cruelly derided, changed this image completely, delivering a sharp, lurid social caricature of his tormentor. Lest anyone miss the point, his vampire was called Lord Ruthven -- the name that Lady Caroline Lamb, Byron's scorned lover, had given to her own caricature of him in her bestseller about their steamy affair, Glenarvon. To further complicate matters, Polidori's vampire tale was based on a fragment that Byron had scribbled out as his contest entry, and many people thought he had written Polidori's novel. In any case, all the famous vampires that followed, from Bram Stoker's Dracula (who didn't appear until 1897) to Anne Rice's Lestat and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Saint-Germain, draw their lineage from Polidori's portrait of Byron. ~ Alice K Turner of Washington Post

These are some of the ineresting facts you will learn. Book mark this page and check in with us to see what book we feature.

We invite you to get lost in the many adventures that our book club has to offer!