Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus (Vintage Classics)
NOW A NETFLIX FILM • The most famous horror story in world literature—the original tale of a mad scientist and his monster—is also a profoundly moving masterpiece.
Features a New Introduction by Jeanette Winterson
When the scientist Victor Frankenstein attempts to create life in his laboratory, he sets in motion tragic forces beyond his control and faces losing everything he loves. No reader in the grip of Mary Shelley's novel, with its mythic-minded hero and its highly sympathetic monster who reads Goethe and longs to be at peace with himself, can fail to notice how much more excellent the original is than all the countless adaptations, imitations, and homages which have followed in its ample wake. In her first novel, written at the instigation of Lord Byron and published in 1818 (and revised in 1831), the teenaged Shelley managed to produce English Romanticism's finest prose fiction. This edition reproduces her original 1818 text.
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Community Reviews
This scientist thinks of everything, doesn't he?
He sews up all the dead body parts, he puts all the organs in the right place and uses an electrical lighting bolt from a storm to bring his formation to life.
Except he forgets one important thing, he never stops to think of the responsibility that accompanies giving life.
Being human is lonely already.
If Victor Frankenstein had put 'pause' on his need for selfish scientific achievement and just reached out to his creation with kindness and empathy, things would have worked out better.
Victor wants recognition for being a creator of life but his experimental invention results in the destruction of many.
Knowing how to get a heart to beat again doesn't mean that you understand a thing about humanity.
All his creation needed was a little guidance and a word of encouragement but no one anywhere in the world held any love in their hearts for this poor neglected being who never knew love.
The true monsters are revealed.
If you have a God complex and/or Daddy issues, then this is the book for you!!! Mary Shelley wrote the scariest story known to mankind, which is basically what happens when a man invents something highly destructive and then regrets it, but it's way too late and it bites him -- but mostly OTHER PEOPLE -- in the ass (also see: the nuclear bomb). Really, the story of Pandora's Box was probably about a man. Great work, Mary. I've also done really destructive things to get my father's attention, so this book was very relatable.
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