Jason Henderson is the author of the Alex van Helsing books, about a fourteen year old descendant of the vampire hunter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula living in a boarding school near Geneva, who just might be the supernatural world’s James Bond. The first book depends a lot on the events of the Haunted Summer at Villa Diodati, where Mary Shelley, John Polidori, Lord Byron, and others decided to test their ability to write an original ghost story on a dark and stormy night.
I asked Jason if he would write a little about the Haunted Summer. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was not the only literary work to emerge from that party at the Villa Diodiati; John Polidori is largely unknown today.Except, apparently, in Texas, around Halloween, when you can go to a Polidori Pumpkin Party. Which would be a TOTALLY cool event for any library (or teen group) to hold. I know I want to go!
John Polidori, Mary Shelley, and the Haunted Summer
by Jason Henderson
My favorite Halloween Activity is something called Polidori’s Pumpkin Party, a major leaf-blown Autumn fiesta started in Texas of all places back in the 90s. We named it after a guy named Polidori; more on him later. But the idea of the party was this:
• Invite your friends to a Halloween Party
• Cost of admission: something creative. A story (keep it under ten minutes, guys), a painted mask, a cupcake if it’s creative
• Everyone has to sit at the hot seat and present without making a fuss about how their offering isn’t any good. If they start doing that, everyone should yell, DECLAIM! Until the person stops apologizing and reads.
• Repeat until everyone has presented.
The Polidori Party became a lifeblood of creativity for me and my friends both in school and after because it was an excuse to be creative, to have to be creative at least once in a year. “Are you ready for Polidori”? “I still have to write for Polidori”. Everyone spent time (often literally the day of the party, but that’s life) preparing. Hint: I really recommend making this part of your Halloween tradition.
Every Halloween I think of Polidori and his friends, who were generally considered the coolest kids in Europe, in the cold summer months of 1816. They were the original haunted story-slingers, brash and overconfiden,t and often brilliant.
I wrote about them in my first Alex Van Helsing book, and most of this recap in fact bears a strong resemblance to a talk given by Alex’s mentor, the motorcycle-riding super spy Mister Sangster. Mister Sangster has the benefit of teaching on the very lake where the group hung out—we can only imagine.
It is to me the perfect Halloween story, though it wasn’t actually Halloween. It was summer, and it was cold.
The party at the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816—the Haunted Summer–consisted of five writers: Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who were already quite famous; two young women writers, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (soon to be Shelley) and her half-sister Claire (whom Mary disliked so much that she doesn’t even mention her in the introduction to Frankenstein); and Byron’s doctor friend, Polidori, who wrote short stories. They were bored out of their heads, because although it was summer, there had been a massive volcanic eruption in Asia that had clouded the sky and made the weather everywhere cold and rainy. So Lord Byron issued each of them a challenge: write the scariest, most terrifying story you can.
In her introduction to the 1831 edition, Mary says the famous guys each wrote some minor pieces, and that Dr. Polidori had—and this is kind of fun—“some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole — to see what I forget — something very shocking and wrong of course.’”
I mean, we had to base our party on him.
Remember: they were all very young.
Lord Byron, on the run from creditors, was 28, Shelley was 24, fleeing his marriage, with his new 18-year-old mistress Mary; John Polidori was 21; and Claire was 18. After the summer which birthed The Vampyre, Childe Harold Canto IV, and Frankenstein, they didn’t last long, either. Polidori was dead in five years, Shelley a year later, and Byron two years after that. Within eight years, all but Mary and her sister Claire were dead. In between were tragedies no parent should ever endure, and they endured them again and again.
But in 1831, something about the record changed. When Mary was 34, she rewrote her masterpiece Frankenstein for a new edition. She promised her editor that the revisions would be minor, a few typo fixes here and there. But it wasn’t true—the 1831 Frankenstein was a clean-up job. It got rid of the messy politics of the earlier version, and, best of all, added her introduction, which told the story of the Haunted Summer, but cleaned that up, too: it eliminated Claire, by whom she was embarrassed, and most of all, changed what the attendants were writing about.
When I wrote the first Alex Van Helsing book, the crux of the story was that something about the change Mary made to when she was in her thirties was an attempt to hide something about what happened when she was a teenager. That there are secrets between the lines. I feel that way today, and it is true of my own books. So there are secrets inside secrets.
Here we are in October. Capture the spirit of that crew: Byron, Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Claremont, Polidori. What are the secrets you can reveal?
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Interested in learning more about John Polidori?
Find out how to host a Polidori Pumpkin Party by visiting the Polidori Society’s website.
And, of course, there are Jason’s own books. In the spirit of the challenge at the Villa Diodiati during that Haunted Summer, take the time to celebrate your creativity this Halloween!
The Witching Hour is the first book in the Mayfair Witches series. Sure, it’s long, and it has a gigantic, annoying expository chunk in the middle, but I still find the story addictive and, well, bewitching. Par for the course with Anne Rice, in the next books (Lasher and Taltos) the story gets pretty twisted. But for gothic and erotic supernatural horror, it’s a slam-dunk.
It’s impossible to write about witches without at least a mention of Shakespeare’s literary creations, as they toil and trouble, making predictions that can lead only to disaster. Just as with The Crucible, the play-that-shall-not-be-named has been made into a movie– actually, more than once. The most recent production stars Patrick Stewart (formerly known as Captain Picard of the Starship Enterprise) who is a brilliant Shakespearean actor and only gets better as time passes. If you really want to make required reading of this play a killer experience, there’s no better way than with a live (or filmed, anyway) performance, right at Halloween.
I’ve just discovered Kim Harrison’s Rachel Morgan books and am really enjoying them. It’s not so much that I like Rachel, but she really shows ingenuity in getting out of some crazy scrapes, and she makes friends and allies in the oddest places. Rachel, a witch, lives in Cincinnati in an alternate world where paranormal creatures have “outed” themselves and live in a separate area of the city called The Hollows, with a legal structure parallel to the human legal system. Naturally this leaves a lot of room for chaos, much of which centers on Rachel and her supernatural business partners, who are a hoot, when they’re not being dangerously lethal. Readers who are looking for a fix after finishing the Southern Vampire Mysteries might very well enjoy Kim Harrison. 
There’s just something claustrophobic about small towns, whether they’re isolated in the mountains or gated communities. Once you’re in, it’s hard to escape the supernatural… or the neighbors. That’s what happens in both Chris Bohjalian’s The Night Strangers and Susie Moloney’s Thirteen. In Bohjalian’s novel, a guilt-ridden pilot moves his family into a mountain village only to find that the unfinished basement is haunted by the deceased passengers of the plane he crashed. In addition to his personal ghosts, though, there are hidden dangers to his family from members of the local community as well. In Moloney’s book, the adult daughter of a woman who has recently died returns to settle the estate, only to find herself entangled in the lives of the people living in the suburb in which she grew up– a place where there seem to have been an unusual number of “accidental” deaths, and finds her beliefs tested by the people around her. Where are the witches in an isolated area, when a stranger moves in? Why, they’re all around you.
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