In the Shadow of Frankenstein: Tales of the Modern PrometheusEdited by Stephen JonesPegasus Books, 2016
When Lord Byron wrote to his publisher about Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, he expressed flat astonishment that such a strange work could be written by “a girl of nineteen – not nineteen, indeed, at that time.” Most of his circle knew the story of the book's origin, and that story has only grown in the telling: how Byron, playing the host at his Geneva villa in 1816, challenged his guests to write ghost stories. They all set to work – Byron, his doctor John Polidori, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Shelley's young lover Mary (Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont sat out the contest) – and only one product of that evening achieved immortality. Mary imagined a “pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together,” a mad, passionate dreamer who would harness mysterious galvanic forces to bring an unliving thing to life.The book was published anonymously in January of 1818 and invoked a chorus of outrage from critics, one of whom, working up a full head of steam in the Quarterly Review, complained that the book “gratuitously harasses the heart.”That critic wasn't wrong. The 1818 edition of Frankenstein is a weird, atonal howl of a book, a stilted phantasmagoria that virtually demands to be read in one tense sitting. It tells the story of a young grandiose scientist named Victor Frankenstein who uses arcane science to create life. “I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body,” he reflects. “For this I had deprived myself of rest and health, but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream had vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” His Creature is huge and hideous and repulses him to such a visceral extent that he foreswears the godlike addiction to parthenogenesis: “I had resolved in my own mind, that to create another like the fiend I had first made would be an act of the basest and most atrocious selfishness; and I banished from my mind every thought that could lead to a different conclusion.”But there was never any real chance of such a thought staying banished. It's true that Victor later destroys the prototype Eve he'd begun constructing for his monstrous Adam, but Mary Shelley didn't share the conviction; in the final pages of her novel, she has the Creature drifting away on an ice flow, solemnly promising to kill himself now that Frankenstein is dead. Shelley, not exactly the most squeamish of authors when it comes to dishing out violent ends for her characters, can't bring herself to kill the monster.Nobody else has ever been able to do it either. Initial critical carping notwithstanding, the popular imagination seized on Frankenstein and his monster and has never let go. Editions have flowed from the presses, and Colin Clive yelling “it's ALIVE!” in James Whale's 1931 movie adaptation became instant cultural shorthand. The outburst is, for example, the title of the introductory essay by Stephen Jones in In the Shadow of Frankenstein: Tales of the Modern Prometheus, a big, beautiful new volume out this summer from Pegasus Books.There's a precise and oddly cheering irony in the fact that In the Shadow of Frankenstein: Tales of the Modern Prometheus is itself a revived corpse of a long-dead thing. Back in 1994, Stephen Jones edited The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, a typically wonderful overstuffed volume in the old “Mammoth” series of titles that included such gems as The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper, The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunits, and The Mammoth Book of Dracula. The “Mammoth Books” weren't just stitched-together compendia of reprinted material; they had the breath of life that comes from newly-commissioned items as well, so each one was an unpredictable assortment of old friends and new treats. In a book market choked, then as now, with productions of dubious merit, the “Mammoth Books” were virtually guaranteed to please.They flickered in and out of print, and many disappeared, but The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein has returned, christened with a new name and given a new and glorious corporeal form. In the Shadow of Frankenstein has Jones's brief, nearly perfunctory Introduction and an even briefer and completely perfunctory Preface by fan favorite Neil Gaiman, and it's filled with twenty-four short stories and a single parting-shot poem. And as in the original novel that started it all, the gap between model and knock-off is a yawning gulf. In Mary Shelley's book, the Creature, left to its own devices, realizes he's “dependent on none, and related to none” and educates himself in the ways of mankind by reading Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and The Sorrows of Young Werther. He might consider himself “solitary and abhorred,” but when he finally confronts his creator, he does so in the sonorous cadences of high-Restoration rhetoric:
“Be calm! I entreat you to hear me, before you give vent to your hatred on my devoted head. Have I not suffered enough that you seek to increase my misery? Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it. Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself; my height is superior to thine; my joints more supple. But I will not be tempted to set myself in opposition to thee. I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king, if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me. Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other, and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am thy fallen angel ...”
By contrast, the short pieces Jones has assembled here universally take their cues not from Milton and Goethe but from Creature Double Feature (and, in the case of Robert Bloch's 1939 story “Mannikins of Horror,” the world of the pulps). There are items here from such various old industry hacks as Manly Wade Wellman (“Pithecanthropus Rejectus”), Ramsey Campbell (“A New Life”), and Karl Edward Wagner, laying it on with a trowel in “Undertow”:
Kane! Even to a stranger in Carsultyal, greatest city of mankind's dawn, that name evoked the spectre of terror. A thousand tales were whispered of Kane; even in this city of sorcery, where the lost knowledge of prehuman Earth had been recovered to forge man's stolen civilization, Kane was a figure of awe and mystery. Despite uncounted tales of strange and disturbing nature, almost nothing was known for certain of the man save that for generations his tower had brooded over Carsultyal. There he followed the secret paths along which his dark genius led him, and the hand of Kane was rarely seen (though it was often felt) in the affairs of Carsultyal. Brother sorcerers and masters of powers temporal alike spoke his name with dread, and those who dared to make him an enemy seldom were given long to repent their audacity.
Kim Newman takes his usual cinema-obsessed route in “Completist Heaven,” and Peter Tremayne adds a much-needed note of sly levity in “The Hound of Frankenstein,” but whether the stories are coming from leathery old journeyman word-counters like Basil Copper (“Better Dead”) and Guy Smith (“Last Train”) or slumming writers of genuine talent like John Brunner (“Tantamount to Murder”) or Lisa Morton (“Poppi's Monster”), the aforementioned yawning gulf remains unbridged. Without exception, the two dozen stories gathered here strive to echo the least important aspects of Mary Shelley's masterpiece, especially, as in Brian Mooney's “Chandria,” the creepy atmospherics:
The dead creature was lurching to its feet, its movements stiff and feeble, like those of a badly-strung puppet. Having gained a precarious standing position, it turned and began to stagger towards me, remnant of tail wagging half-heartedly. A swollen, blackened tongue, partly gnawed by something, lolled from the side of its mouth, and the blind holes gazed into my face. Deep in the sockets, I could see writhing nests of maggots and …
Victor Frankenstein's megalomania is transposed and lampooned and pastiched to within an inch of its life; virtually none of these authors can resist a wild-eyed mustache-twirling villain, like Paul McAuley's coolly insane title character in “The Temptation of D. Stein”:
The girl's mouth worked. Her chest heaved as if she was pumping up something inside herself, when she said in a low whisper, “It is the Jews that will be blamed.”Dr. Stein said, “That's always been true.”“But that's why you're here, isn't it?”Dr. Stein met Dr. Pretorius's black gaze. “How many have you killed, in your studies?”“Oh, most of them were already dead. They gave themselves for science, just as in the ancient days young girls were sacrificed for the pagan gods.”“Those days are gone.”“Greater days are to come. You will help. I know you will.”
It's true that Stephen Volk's “Celebrity Frankenstein” brings a touch of wry cynicism to an otherwise very stompingly serious Table of Contents, as does Jo Fletcher's whimsical poem “Frankenstein,” but for the most part, the stories here follow the hyperventilating imprint of what their authors think is going on in Frankenstein. These tales are all about the gesticulating hubris of Victor Frankenstein, whose counterpart in David Case's “The Dead End” (originally published in 1969) might couch his rantings in the vocabulary of modern biochemistry but who can't hide his grandiloquent source material:
“You see, cells forget. That is why we grow old, for instance. Our cells forget how to replicate youth. But this knowledge, although forgotten, is still there, in the same way that things a man forgets exist in his subconscious mind. Exactly the same, on a different level. And as subconscious knowledge can be remembered under hypnosis, so the cells can be induced to remember by chemical treatment. And this, Brookes, is the very root of life. It may, among other things, be the key to immortality … But man, as he is, isn't worthy of immortality, and I'm not interested in giving it to him. It will come. I am interested in man's evolution, and I've applied my knowledge in that field. I am the first and only man who has seen evolution as it occurs. Brookes, I am the creator of my ancestor!”
All of which makes for grand good fun, of course. In the Shadow of Frankenstein might seem like a natural pick for Hallowe'en, but its arrival in bookstores in midsummer is apt: without exception, the stories reprinted here are beach-and-hammock affairs, the kind of cheesy plot-driven things that have always been written by line-item typewriter jockeys hurrying to make a deadline for some (but not much) badly-needed cash. They're the type of stories that really ought not to be reprinted (as a general rule, for instance, there is never a good reason to reprint Manly Wade Wellman), but if a publisher is going to reprint them, that publisher should do as the folks at Pegasus have done: make a big, unabashedly entertaining production out of the whole thing. If In the Shadow of Frankenstein finds the wide reading public it should, readers can only hope for similarly revived and prettified editions of more of the great, uninhibitedly schlocky old “Mammoth Book” series.And if purists howl at the inaccuracy of it all, rightly insisting that Mary Shelley's book is an entirely deeper and smarter, more alarming and ultimately far more moving thing than any of these lurching, half-alive parodies, well, Stephen Jones long ago anticipated their needs: the whole of Frankenstein is reprinted here as well.____Steve Donoghue is a writer and reader living in Boston. His reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The National, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and The Christian Science Monitor. He is the Managing Editor of Open Letters Monthly, and hosts one of its blogs, Stevereads.
