This was not the book that I’d thought it’d be
40 pages in, I was thinking that there’d been some error and I was reading the wrong book.
There is no Dr Frankenstein, no monster, no big frights, no hordes of peasants carrying pitchforks and tires and torches. Mr Frankenstein is well learned, in both science and alchemy, but at the time they apparently didn’t award doctorates. Officially his creation is called the creature, although it is of monstrous size at about 8 feet tall. The creature isn’t even afraid of fire, and he speaks more artfully than I do.
The Bride of Frankenstein is actually a closer adaption of the book.
But horrible things happen. All sorts of folks meet untimely ends because of the monster, but it’s more shocking and frightening.
Something that I found weird was that the story is 3 frames deep at one point. The entire story is in a letter written by the captain of a ship caught in the ice near the north pole, so that’s one level deep. Then Mr Frankenstein starts telling his story, and that is frame #2. Finally Mr. Frankenstein is listening to the creature tell his part of the story, making level #3.
You are 40% through the story before the creature really shows up.
Now if you accept that Frankenstein is projecting, then it could be that the creature is really just his own subconscious, and Mr. Frankenstein is in fact the murderer of all these folks. But the first frame voids that possibility because Frankenstein had a witness to the creature.
So maybe the real horror story is the captain freezing to death at the north pole, writing a goodbye letter to his sister that steadily goes farther off the tracks. He even imagines that he escaped the ice! He must have died there.
That’s a little scary.
Mary Shelley wrote the book. Everyone is obligated to mention that her mom, Mary Wollstonecraft, was an early feminist who claimed marriage was just a tool of the patriarchy. She died, unmarried, after giving birth to her own creature, after several days of agony that a handful of satiric poets made fun of in a poetic justice sort of way.
That’s the scariest bit of all.
