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  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407074290
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

Frankenstein

Or The Modern Prometheus




One of the greatest horror stories ever written - a scientist's quest to create life has nightmarish consequences that threaten everything he holds dear.

'It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open . . .'

What you create can destroy you.

One freezing morning, a lone man wandering across the Arctic ice caps is rescued from starvation by a ship's captain. That man is Victor Frankenstein and his story is one of ambition, murder and revenge. As a young scientist he pushed moral boundaries in order to cross the final scientific frontier and create life. But his unnatural creation is a monster stitched together from grave-robbed body parts who has no place in the world, and his life can only lead to tragedy.

Written when she was only nineteen, Shelley's gothic tale is one of the greatest horror stories ever written.

  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407074290
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

Other books in the series

Emma
Persuasion
A Dog's Heart
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
Selected Poetry
On Sparta
Man and Superman
Saint Joan
Botchan
Kusamakura
Love
Annals
Selected Poems
Military Dispatches

About the author

Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the daughter of pioneering thinkers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, eloped with the poet Percy Shelley at the age of sixteen. Three years later, during a wet summer on Lake Geneva, Shelley famously wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein. The years of her marriage were blighted by the deaths of three of her four children, and further tragedy followed in 1822, when Percy Shelley drowned in Italy. Following his death, Mary Shelley returned to England and continued to travel and write until her own death at the age of fifty-three.

Also by Mary Shelley

See all

Praise for Frankenstein

A haunting, melancholy work of gothic beauty

Independent

The most famous of all horror stories still packs a punch

Daily Mail

A masterpiece

Phillip Pullman

Frankenstein launched an entire genre of dystopian fiction, and a legacy of horror at the consequences of unbridled experimentation

Daily Telegraph

Shelley's speechifying, lonely, Miltonic monster remains one of the greatest characters in all of literature. The book may also be the greatest meditation on birth I have ever read.

Siri Hustvedt, The Week

A masterpiece

Philip Pullman

More relevant today than ever

Benjamin Zephaniah

One of the most original and complete productions of the day

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion

Mary Shelley