Frankenstein
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly
Public Domain Books
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**+
DESCRIPTION: Upon the icy Northern ocean, an English expedition finds a half-mad gentleman among the ice floes. His name is Victor Frankenstein, and the tale he tells of his youthful ambitions, his ultimate triumph over the very source of life, and ultimate torments at the hands of his own diabolical, unnatural creation, will haunt his listeners to the end of their days.
REVIEW: This is a tale of misery and torment. Oh, what miseries Victor suffers... He scarce could stand, for the weight of them must surely crush his legs. Fever madnesses burn his brain, a thousand torments preclude his joys. Page upon page, chapter upon chapter, the sorrows and sins unwind in stiflingly dense prose. He grinds his teeth and tears his hair and faints in fits of unfathomable guilt like a third-rate actor chewing the scenery. The tale of man attempting godhood, of the responsibilites of the creator to his creation, of genius gone astray and love transmuted to bitter hatred, fairly drowns in the sea of tears wept by the doctor. At some point, such paroxysms of utter misery stop being gloomy atmosphere and become smothering smog... but, then, without them this would've been a short story instead of a full-blown novel. The idea may be classic, but the execution nearly had me tearing my hair out like the good Doctor Frankenstein - sadly, for entirely different reasons.
You might also enjoy:
Kiln People (David Brin, Fiction - Humans learn to make living clay replicas of themselves, which are inherently considered disposable property)
The Stoneheart trilogy (Charlie Fletcher, YA Fiction - A boy who abuses his gift of creation finds himself plunged into an invisible war raging in London's streets)
The Coldfire trilogy (C. S. Friedman, Fiction - A human colony lives at the mercy of its own subconscious creations, brought to life by a planet's natural forces)
The Inkheart trilogy (Cornelia Funke, YA Fiction - A bookbinder accidentally reads characters to life from a storybook)
A Wizard of Earthsea (Ursula K. LeGuin, Fiction - A young wizard must confront the deadly entity he unwittingly unleashed as a young boy)
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson, Fiction - An upstanding doctor's bizarre association with a monstrous stranger leads to a horrific mystery)
The Invisible Man (H. G. Wells, Fiction - A scientist achieves his ultimate goal of invisibilty, only to doom himself)
Caliban's Hour (Tad Williams, Fiction - Prospero's inhuman servant Caliban tells his tale of sorrow before exacting vengeance)
The Otherland quartet (Tad Williams, Fiction - In the future, people become victims of a highly potent offshoot of the Internet)
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