Tabs & Twists
Frankenstein
A young scientist brings a creature to life and then abandons it, in the founding novel of modern science fiction.
- Subgenre
- GothicPhilosophical novel
- Setting / Period
- Early 19th-century Europe
- Tone
- DarkMelancholic
- First published
- 1818
- Pages
- 280
- Language
- English
Review
Victor Frankenstein, driven by ambition, builds a living being from dead matter and is horrified by the result. Rejected by his maker and by the world, the creature learns language, kindness and finally rage.
Most people know the stitched-together monster from films, and the book is nothing like them. The creature is eloquent, wounded and morally sharp, and the novel asks who is the real monster: the made or the maker who refuses responsibility.
Shelley's frame of letters and nested narrators is a bit stiff, but the central chapters, with the creature telling his own story, are devastating. It remains one of the best books ever written about the cost of ambition without care.
