“The year without a summer,” as 1816 came to be known, gave birth not only to paintings of fiery sunsets and tempestuous skies but two genres of gothic fiction. The freakish progeny were Frankenstein and the human vampire, which have loomed large in art and literature ever since.
William J. Broad writes for the New York Times’s science section on a new history of the eruption of Mount Tambora. Mount Tambora, a volcano in present-day Indonesia, experienced a massive eruption in 1815; the result was a global climate event whose effects could be seen in life around the world, even contemporary literature and landscapes.
