Frankenstein

For years Victor Frankenstein labors to create a new race of intelligent beings. He spends his nights scrounging human and animal body parts from graveyards, slaughterhouses, and hospital dissection rooms. By day he experiments in his secret laboratory, perfecting the creature whom, he believes, will worship him as a god. When he succeeds, Frankenstein is horrified by the ugly brutishness of the patchwork being he has brought to life. Rather than exult in his accomplishment, he runs from it, retreating to the comfort of long-neglected friends and family. Frankenstein has, indeed, created a monster . . . not by animating dead flesh but by abandoning his creation. Now, the monster is out for revenge.

Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was the author of five novels and numerous works of short fiction, and she is best known for Frankenstein. The daughter of feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley was steeped in the progressive ideas of the early 19th-century British Romantic era.