Imagine you are eighteen years old, sitting in a dark room on a stormy night. Your friends dare you to write a scary story. That is exactly what happened to Mary Shelley. In the summer of 1816, Mary was visiting Switzerland with a group of writers. Rain kept them inside for days. To pass the time, they had a competition to see who could write the scariest story. Mary struggled at first. Then one night, she had a vivid dream about a scientist who creates a living creature from dead body parts. She turned that dream into a novel called Frankenstein, published on March 18, 1818. The book tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who becomes obsessed with creating life. When his creature wakes up, Victor is horrified and abandons it. The creature, left alone and rejected by everyone it meets, becomes angry and dangerous. Shelley's story asks a powerful question: who is the real monster, the creature or the scientist who created it and then ran away? Frankenstein is often called the first science fiction novel because it imagines what could happen if science went too far.