Frankenstein ranks among the most enduring horror tales ever imagined. The groaning Monster, bolts erupting from his neck and stitches fastening his square brow, is famous worldwide. But the creature born in Mary Shelley's mind nearly two hundred years ago was far more complex: murderous and raging, but also articulate, lonely, and gravely misunderstood by the world into which he was thrust. The story of Victor Frankenstein emerges in a series of letters penned by Walton, an English explorer icebound in the Arctic. While studying natural philosophy in Geneva, Frankenstein discovers how to give life to inanimate matter, and from dead flesh constructs a living being. His Monster possesses superhuman speed and strength, and learns of human emotion by studying Goethe, Plutarch, and Milton's Paradise Lost. But as the creature's mind and thoughts develop, his loneliness and misery build, and he acts out in deadly violence. When the scientist refuses to create a companion for him, the Monster lets loose his full wrath. Berserk, he murders Frankenstein's wife, then flees to the North Pole. Frankenstein follows, desperate to destroy his rampaging creation. Once there he meets Walton and confesses the horror that is drawing him deep into the Arctic wasteland. Jeffery Deaver pours a suspense master's insight into his introduction, exploring the author's drive to thrill and terrify, and digging at the actual birthplace of Frankenstein's monster: Mary Shelley's mind. The author of sixteen novels, Deaver has appeared on bestseller lists around the world. His novel The Bone Collector was produced as a feature film by Universal Pictures starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie, and his most recent novel, The Blue Nowhere, is being produced by Warner Brothers.
Frankenstein, loved by many decades of readers and praised by such eminent literary critics as Harold Bloom, seems hardly to need a recommendation. If you haven't read it recently, though, you may not remember the sweeping force of the prose, the grotesque, surreal imagery, and the multilayered doppelgänger themes of Mary Shelley's masterpiece. As fantasy writer Jane Yolen writes of this (the reviewer's favorite) edition, "The strong black and whites of the main text [illustrations] are dark and brooding, with unremitting shadows and stark contrasts. But the central conversation with the monster--who owes nothing to the overused movie image ... but is rather the novel's charnel-house composite--is where [Barry] Moser's illustrations show their greatest power ... The viewer can all but smell the powerful stench of the monster's breath as its words spill out across the page. Strong book-making for one of the world's strongest and most remarkable books." Includes an illuminating afterword by Joyce Carol Oates.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
Promises kept:
Like Poe, strong roots in its Gothic horror era make this story too wordy to be read as a contemporary classic (contradiction in terms, I suppose), but the basic storyline does stand up over time. A basic story, by the way, which no movie version has yet successfully captured, not even Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. That overwrought hyper-surrealistic version by Kenneth Brannagh captures the framework of the book in neat prologue/epilogue bookends, and Robert De Niro captures the menace and humanity of... more info
great story:
i read this book right after dracula and well, it's definitely a good read and an edge of your seat thriller. it has stood the test of time in terms of it's theme and lesson.
I feel sorry...:
for the people who hated this book and gave it poor reviews. Really missed out on what may be the greatest novel of all time. For me it's hard to put down. And the themes are deep and everlasting ones that humans will forever struggle with. Life and death, God vs science, good and evil, spiritual themes, and social ones also, all wrapped up in a GREAT story. Oh well, you can't expect everyone to get it and resonate with it. One thing about this Rieger version: it says it "reproduces for the first time... more info
Choose the 1818 version:
Most editions of Mary Shelley's landmark book available today follow the heavily revised 1831 version. The impulse behind this trend is an honorable one (to present what is seemingly an author's "final revision"),but the 1818 version is preferable for many reasons. Looking back on her creation in later life, Shelley felt obliged to alter the book's focus in significant ways, adding what critic Marilyn Butler accurately describes as "long passages in which her main narrator, [Victor] Frankenstein, expresses... more info
