Frankenstein
Few creatures of horror have seized readers' imaginations and held them for so long as the anguished monster of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The story of Victor Frankenstein's terrible creation and the havoc it caused has enthralled generations of readers and inspired countless writers of horror and suspense. Considering the novel's enduring success, it is remarkable that it began merely as a whim of Lord Byron's.
"We will each write a story," Byron announced to his next-door neighbors, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley. The friends were summering on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland in 1816, Shelley still unknown as a poet and Byron writing the third canto of Childe Harold. When continued rains kept them confined indoors, all agreed to Byron's proposal.
The illustrious poets failed to complete their ghost stories, but Mary Shelley rose supremely to the challenge. With Frankenstein, she succeeded admirably in the task she set for herself: to create a story that, in her own words, "would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror -- one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart."
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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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