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Science meets horror in a new edition of a classic, featuring illustrations by Amanda Shaffer and an introduction by bestselling author Melissa Marr.
One dreary summer on the shores of Lake Geneva, amid discussions of galvanism and the occult and fireside readings from a collection of German ghost stories, Lord Byron proposed a game. Each of his guests—eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin and her future husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, among them—would try their hand at writing a tale of the supernatural. Unable at first to think of a plot, Mary was visited one sleepless night by the terrible vision of a corpse, a “hideous phantasm of a man,” lurching to life with the application of some unknown, powerful force. The man responsible, a “pale student of unhallowed arts,” fled in horror from his creation, leaving it to return to the dead matter from which it had been born. But the monster did not die. It followed the man to his bedside, where it stood watching him with “yellow, watery, but speculative eyes”—eyes of one who thought and felt.
The novel that Mary Shelley would go on to publish, the legend of Victor Frankenstein and his unholy creation, and their obsessive, murderous pursuit of each other from Switzerland to the North Pole, has been the stuff of nightmares for nearly two centuries. A masterpiece of Romantic literature, it is also one of the most enduring horror stories ever written, dramatized by Shaffer’s full-page original illustrations that bring the monster’s tale to dramatic life. New York Times–bestselling author Marr places Mary Shelley in the pantheon of female trailblazers, among such notables as Greta Thunberg and Taylor Swift, citing Shelley as the first woman writer of science fiction; a girl, underestimated, providing one of the most recognizable stories of all time.
