A new anthology bringing together five great new and established writers to explore the world of Mary Shelley’s all-time classic, Frankenstein
“My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.”
Victor Frankenstein was the first to unlock the key to life, but he would not be the last. Through two centuries of scientific enquiry and relentless advancement, five more minds found the secret, and five more creatures were made. Five more stories ended in tragedy.
From the 1840s to the modern day, from the race to publish the first anatomy to the desperate search for weapons to win the Second World War, telling the stories of the creatures that never were.
Waiting within the pages of this anthology are five new stories taking Mary Shelley's story of Frankenstein and giving it a unique twist. Spanning different time periods from the 1850's with Kaseem's Way, to the present day with Love Thee Better, each tale keeps to the solemn voice of the original.
Some stories resonated more with me than others but they all managed to sustain the feeling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The authors have all taken the mad doctor's ideology of reanimation and molded it into their own monstrous creation, terrifying yet piteous.
Kaseem's Way by Tade Thompson, takes place in Newgate Prison's "dead room", where anatomists create a new being from spare parts. The New Woman by Rose Biggin tells of the creation of a female in the final days of the 19th century. Reculver by Paul Meloy transports us to WWII to a lonely boy and a very human horror. In Emma Newman's Made Monstrous, a detective investigating corpse's missing body parts takes the stage. Love Thee Better takes us aboard a different type of cruise ship, one in which people who hate their body parts, and people who are missing parts unite.
What drew me initially to this anthology is the cover. Simplistic in design, but still evoking the essence of Frankenstein, like all the stories contained within. While it's hard to rate an anthology as a whole due to the varied authors and stories held within, Creatures: The Legacy of Frankenstein is definitely worth a read this Halloween season.
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