What are you doing this Halloween? Heading to an all-night Twilight themed disco, for some reason? Trick or treating? Telling ghost stories like Shelley and Byron? Well, don’t. Take off your Robert Pattinson mask, put the rotten eggs in the fridge, let your friends down and read this book. It has everything you need for a really scary All Hallows Eve: death and remorse, shame and suffering, and an eight foot monster with the mind of an infant, made of stolen body parts.
This is a tale of the bitter battle between monster and man, ultimately highlighting humanity’s inability to live up to its name: humanity’s monstrosity killing the monsters initial humanity.
Frankenstein (the ardent amateur scientist, NOT the monster, contrary to popular folly) attempts to create the ‘perfect’ being, only to regret his decision when his creation turns out to be hideously ugly. Frankenstein makes a getaway and the monster roams the mountains in the hope of forging any kind of human connection, only to be looked on by the villagers as a dentist does a toffee apple *(complete and utter horror). 
The monster seeks revenge on the maker who snubbed him and murders his brother, yet somehow manages to convince him to create a female version of himself for companionship: and it is this kind of oxymoronic persuasiveness that makes Shelley’s writing so beautiful, so emblematically Romantic in style and yet often, so fantastically horrible in content. Against a backdrop of the sublime, this author blends realism and the supernatural to provoke sympathy for the monster, despite him killing Frankenstein’s friend and wife after he abandons ‘project partner’.
As Frankenstein attempts to transcend human limits into godlike power with his creation, the ugly monster wishes to break into society and transcend the superficial, a tragic idealism that cannot fit into what is an essentially shallow world. And if that prospect doesn’t scare you, I don’t know what will...
By Mia Bleach
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