October Nightmares IV #13: Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley - An Abomination

By Sam Graham

First thing you should know is, no one says “it’s alive, it’s alive” in the book. What a disappointment.

Also called The Modern Prometheus if you’re a wanker, Frankenstein was published in 1818 by Mary Shelley (as in the film, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), but back in the day it was originally published anonymously. It was assumed that Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote it. After all, he wrote the preface and he was knocking Mary off behind his wife’s back at the time, but then people started to notice that, compared to Percy’s writings, it was a bit shit.

Shame she didn’t have Twitter back then. Just write a hashtag about how Lord Byron tried to finger her in the back of a hansom. She’d have shot straight to the top 10.

So, Frankenstein. You know the story by now. And if you don’t know that Frankenstein is the creator and not the monster, what the fuck are you doing?

While this may be the quintessential ‘mad scientist’ tale, be aware going in that Shelley really did a David Copperfield on Victor Frankenstein. By that I mean that you have to wade through his entire life story, his upbringing, his friends, his family, and lengthy ruminations on how they all love and adore each other oh so much in this joyous, rich man of Switzerland’s world. The short version is this: Victor is a burgeoning science geek. His old man is a rich doctor. Victor is sent to medical school, because Daddy’s paying for his education. Victor plans to shag his (adopted) sister once he graduates.

Whilst at med school Victor gets into galvanisation in a big way, like the way the 90’s was big into pills and Dad was big into dogging. He decides that God was a rank amateur and makes his own man from corpse bits.

Here’s where you’d think a rampage would ensue like in all the films, but sadly not. Instead the Monster fucks off to a farm and lives with some pigs, whilst stalking the farmer and his family. He reveals himself to the local blind guy, then gets beaten with a stick. He decides it’s all Victor’s fault, so decides to royally fuck his life up.

Victor cries for a bit and decides to make a wife for his pet homunculus, but backs out at the last minute. The monster kill’s Viccy’s wife/sister/sin factory, his BFF, then buggers off to the Arctic with Victor en tow, who dies conveniently after telling his entire life story like a boss in a Metal Gear Solid game.

It’s got its ups. It’s got its downs. However because this was written in 1818, it has the usual trope of the time of being incredibly over-written. Every sentence is long and chock-full of florid descriptions, then descriptions of those descriptions, then explanations for everything the reader has pretty much already sussed out just from reading the action. Words are just ejaculated onto the page for the sake of having them there.

For those who may not know, there were 2 main reasons that Victorian fiction was like this:

1 – Only toffs could write. Old money snobs are fairly full of themselves (after all, the poor are only poor, because they don’t want to be rich, of course). They love to flex their sense of dominance, and what better way to do that than to show off how infinitely smart they are by making their literary deeds a cornucopia of eloquence (or as I call it, shitting a thesaurus on a page). If you don’t believe me, look up how Virginia Woolfe didn’t want poor kids reading her stories and stated that ‘the fact is the lower classes are detestable’. Victorian fiction was mostly stories by toffs, for toffs, and about toffs doing toffy things and society is, sadly, still sucking them dry for it.

2 – They were paid by the word. You’d pad that shit out as much as you could.

Frankenstein is a struggle to read, because of this very reason. It’s very boring. The parts that would serve as most interesting: the creation of the monster, the gathering of the raw materials, are completely glossed over. Instead its a tirade of Victor’s woeful thoughts and frequent chucking himself around in despair. Half way through the story, the monster takes over the narration and he- a pile of stitched together corpse bits- is even more eloquent. There’s so much purple prose in here that it quickly devolves into insipid hyperbole.

Case in point:

“Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live? Why, in that instant, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed? I know not; despair had not yet taken possession of me; my feelings were those of rage and revenge. I could with pleasure have destroyed the cottage and its inhabitants and have glutted myself with their shrieks and misery."

and

“I could have torn him limb from limb, as the lion rends the antelope” the monster comments at one point, when the farmer smacks him with a stick.

As the lion rends the antelope?

Now, I studied literature. I know full well that the monster’s eloquence is a representation of the Human spirit living on after death. That even he, a creature of such ungodly nature, can become more a man than his creator who only created him out of arrogance. That it can be argued that the monster is an amalgamation of every person who went into creating him, thus asking the question of where in the body (if in the body at all), does the soul truly reside?

I get that. I like the concept and I appreciate the complexity of it.

But after wading through all that superfluous text, I just don’t care.

Your best bet is to watch the 1994 film with Kenneth Branagh and Robert De Niro. Firstly, it’s the only Frankenstein film that actually tries to follow the plot of the source material (it does take the liberty of having the monster punch Helena Bonham Carter’s heart out though. She’s Victor’s sister/wife/icon of sin). It keeps the same message whilst cutting down the pretentious garble.

You do have to put up with Branagh, 34 at the time, playing a late teen/early twenties Victor though. His over-acting is superb.

In short, this book only gets onto the classic list, because it’s so old. It’s a real shame, because the story it tells is such a good one, it’s just the way its written. True to form though, Frankenstein is still being resurrected and re-written today, with retelling after retelling, each adding some new twist. A fair number of them being decent. Not I, Frankenstein though. Jesus.

But actually reading Frankenstein is about as much fun as listening to the sort of person who would refer to this book as ‘The Modern Prometheus’, and read you his autobiographical Norse mythology poems that are laden with lines stolen from other (better) poets and heavy metal lyrics.

Enjoyed this piece? Then 'like' The Crusades of A Critic on Facebook. Sam also has a Tech Noir novel, 'An Inside Joke', which can currently be viewed here; his first novella 'Iron Country' is available to buy here; a horror short story, 'We Must Never Found Out', published here; and finally, another short horror story 'Eagal' available to buy here. Phew.