Frankenstein

For today's countdown to Halloween post, I want to make a reading suggestion. I am talking of course of Frankenstein, where Mary Shelley. It has been one of the very first horror novel I discovered when I was twelve or so and have been wanting to come back to it for a while. Well, I bought it a few weeks ago, read it within a week and decided that it would be my first reading suggestion for the countdown. So here it is. I might be one of the few people who first read Frankenstein before seeing any of its numerous adaptation, so maybe I have a different appreciation of it. I never took the novel as pure horror, for me it is more a tragedy with macabre elements. A tragedy in the right sense of the word: with the two main protagonists never completely innocent, nor completely guilty. It is a far more intimist story than most of its adaptation, both the creator and the creature spend a lot of time in solitude and most their interaction are far from human eyes. Some people say it is one of the first science-fiction novels, but I do think the science is more a mean to an end: it is barely mentioned and the method to create the monster is never explained, nor dwelled upon. The imagery and the inspiration is pure Gothic supernatural. Anyway, you know at least some of the plot to a degree, so I will just point out a few misconceptions about the story: Frankenstein is not a doctor, in fact he is still a student when he creates the monster, and the creature is not made of pieces of corpses. Although we know Frankenstein uses something of human corpses, it is not specified that he uses full limbs and sewed them back. In fact, Frankenstein implies that he shaped the body himself, almost ex nihilo, something of corpses as a sculptor would use marble. A lot more could be said about this classic, let's just say that you should read it and forget about what you think you know.