The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

Starred review from August 3, 2009
Medical student Victor Frankenstein imbibes fellow student “Bysshe” Shelley's belief in “the perfectability of mankind” and strives “to create a being of infinite benevolence” in this recasting of Mary Shelley's horror classic from Ackroyd (First Light
). When Victor reanimates the body of acquaintance Jack Keat, he's so horrified at the implications of his Promethean feat that he abandons his creation. Outraged, the Keat creature shadows Victor as an avenging doppelgänger, bringing misery and death to those dearest to him. Ackroyd laces his narrative intelligently with the Romantic ideals of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, and deftly interweaves Victor's fictional travails with events of the well-known 1816 meeting between the poets that inspired Mary to draft her landmark story. His hasty surprise ending may strike some readers as a cheat, though most will agree that his novel is a brilliant riff on ideas that have informed literary, horror and science fiction for nearly two centuries.