(editing an earlier post)
Just finished this morning! Spoilers below. If you intend to read the book, do NOT go any further. You need to take this ride with no hint of what’s coming.
Nothing from the movies or pop-culture prepared me for this mess.
We don’t get a solid description of the monster, but apparently he’s horrifying to behold. What? Did Frankenstein make him ugly on purpose?! We’re not told where or how he came up with the biological material, no grave robbing mentioned. An 8-foot humanoid just sorta appears on Frankenstein’s work bench.
So the monster wakes up (we’re not told what caused this), Frankenstein is horrified at what he’s created…
Let us pause a moment. Frankenstein knows what the fuckin’ thing looks like, he made it! He set out to create artificial life and accomplished it. And now he’s scared shitless the moment his goal comes together?! Y’all, he had plenty of time to think on this.
…runs out in the street for 2 days, his bff spies him and takes him home. Frankenstein (who’s not a doctor BTW, he’s a college kid) runs upstairs and is relieved the monster has ambled off.
“Oh thank Heavens that 8-foot abomination before God is wandering around loose. Not my problem! LOL!”
The monster spends over 2 years in a shed outside of an exiled, French family’s shack in Switzerland. And in all that time no one ever looked in there?! Guess he’s got some sort of cloaking ability, because he runs all over Europe without ever being seen. “Oi! Luv! Was that an 8-foot humanoid monster in the woods?” “Nah, probably another hill giant. Damned illegal Norwegian troll immigrants!”
Monster has a tiny peephole to watch the family and learns French by listening to them. So where did he learn the English he later uses?! Also, he learned to read from the family teaching a beautiful Arab girl that shows up. Whole 'nother story there.
Frankenstein is such a panicky little bitch that every time he gets upset he goes into a fugue and goes nuts for months on end. He does this at least 3 times, if not more. “Boo!” “I have to go to the sanatorium.”
The monster has already killed Frankenstein’s little brother and framed a family friend, getting her hanged. He threatens Frankenstein to continue fucking his world up if he doesn’t make him a bride companion. Frankenstein and bff are going to Scotland where Frankenstein is going to secretly do this thing. He takes nearly a fucking year touring about. “We spent 3 weeks looking at cobblestones.” “Hadn’t you better hustle up in case the monster gets impatient?”
Frankenstein spies the monster watching him work on the bride, freaks out and destroys her right in from of him. Um, I would not piss off an 8-foot monster with superhuman speed and strength. Monster says, “Catch you on your wedding night! K I love U bye bye!” Frankenstein, while looking around the house for the monster on his wedding night, sends his bride upstairs, alone. Guess what? Chicken butts.
Core of the story is Frankenstein and his monster making the same exact mistakes, over and over and over again. Then they lament for 10-pages about how sorry they are. Then they do it again. You can find the plot on any given shampoo bottle, “Lather, Rinse and Repeat.”
So much more weirdness. And BTW, I think Frankenstein should have married his bff instead of his cousin, seemed way more into that guy than her dumb ass. Hell, I’m straight, but that dude sounded pretty tight!
tl;dr: Every single person in the book is a drama queen. 150 pages of drama queen. Makes one wonder what young Shelly was like IRL. Starts and ends with an exciting dog sled race across arctic ice! Everyone dies in the end.
To Mary Shelly’s ghost; You did fucking awesome for a teenager! Most impressive! Next time, get an editor, dial it in. Great arctic chase though! Also, nobody in 2025 gives a shit what Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, or John Polidori wrote for that contest. Smoked 'em girl.
One more thing. Why did you blank out the dates? August, 8th, 17__? 1701 was a very different time than 1799. What were you hiding?!
I also read this only recently and had a similar experience with it.
One of the things that stood out to me though was that for the entire length of the book, the only person ever mentioned to have seen the monster was Frankenstein himself. As you said, it’s an 8 foot monster roaming Europe, and apparently there are zero sightings beside Frankenstein himself, who repeatedly just happens to see him in the distance. The only other people supposedly to have seen him are the French family, but Frankenstein only hears this from the monster’s own account. And supposedly the few people that get strangled, but they’re killed off page and unable to disclose their killer. Also the story isn’t told from an omniscient narrator. It’s all Frankenstein’s personal account.
Given all that, the weirdness of this giant man seemingly randomly appearing, never being seen by anyone else, killing people off page, etc. and even Frankenstein’s own account of making the monster in a vague fugue state sounding like a manic episode, or some kind of madness… I totally thought we were intended to think that maybe Frankenstein’s monster was a figment of his imagination, his psychosis, and maybe that he was also the one blacking out and killing people. That would have definitely made the whole “Frankenstein is the monster” argument have a new meaning for me. But alas, at the end of the story, a third party finally witnesses the monster kill Frankenstein and confirms it’s existence. I kind of wish it hadn’t been seen. It would have made the story and all of the culture around the film assuming that the monster was real more interesting. But, oh well.
Damn! That could have been an all-time twist!