‘Iannounced that I had thought of a story,” wrote Mary Shelley, describing the birth of her most famous literary creation. “What would terrify me would terrify others,” she intuited, waking after a hideous dream, but Frankenstein did more than scare its readers. Two hundred years after its publication in January 1818 it continues to fascinate, haunt and inspire.
Not that the narrator of The Monsters We Deserve – unnamed, but we’re told he shares initials with Mary Shelley as well as with his own progenitor – thinks that it’s a masterpiece. The author of a global horror bestseller, he has retreated to a remote chalet in Switzerland, not far from the novel’s setting, to seek fresh inspiration. He spends some time outlining Frankenstein’s failings, an excellent example of writer’s rancour against a more successful rival, albeit one who has been dead for more than 150 years.
The Monsters We Deserve fits neatly into the familiar category of a narrator writing a novel about not being able to write a novel. Suffering from writer’s block, he is attracted as much to the tale of Frankenstein’s creation as to its actual text: the ghost storytelling competition in a candlelit Geneva villa in 1816, where a teenage girl trounced Europe’s biggest literary celebrity and his genius friend – take that, Byron and Shelley! No such creative breakthrough occurs for him until the weather worsens, and a series of ghostly visitors pass through his doors …
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