Did you get to Cryptonomicon? Goodreads is a good place to go for ideas. Do you have a profile there? I am reading flagamuffin's second-most-enthusiastically-recommended book, Blue Highways. So far so great. The story behind the writing of Frankenstein gives great context, without spoilers if you keep to that section. Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company amused themselves by reading German ghost stories translated into French from the book Fantasmagoriana, then Byron proposed that they "each write a ghost story". Unable to think of a story, young Mary Godwin became anxious: "Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative." During one evening in the middle of summer, the discussions turned to the nature of the principle of life. "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated", Mary noted, "galvanism had given token of such things". It was after midnight before they retired, and unable to sleep, she became possessed by her imagination as she beheld the grim terrors of her "waking dream".During the rainy summer of 1816, the "Year Without a Summer", the world was locked in a long cold volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. Mary Shelley, aged 18, and her lover (and later husband) Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The weather was consistently too cold and dreary that summer to enjoy the outdoor holiday activities they had planned, so the group retired indoors until dawn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner_of_Chillon For my money, they weren't far from a true-life scary story. Like Byron, I've been inside this castle and its dungeon ... the room is under "lakelevel"; when it rained the lake would spill through narrow windows and begin to drown the prisoner. That said, as places of imprisonment go, it is maybe the most beautiful.