Before You Begin

A ship is locked in the Arctic ice when its captain sees a stranger near death upon the floes, drawn there by a wild and impossible pursuit. The stranger is Victor Frankenstein, a young man of Geneva who once believed he could wrest the secret of life from the grave — and who succeeded. On a dreary night of toil he saw the dull yellow eye of his creature open, and from that instant his triumph curdled into horror. What he made was no mere experiment; it was a being eight feet tall, eloquent, hungry for love, and capable of a grief that turns to vengeance.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was barely eighteen when she conceived this story during a storm-bound summer beside Lake Geneva in 1816, in a ghost-story contest among friends. The novel she built from that nightmare became the first true work of science fiction and one of the most haunting moral fables ever written — a meditation on ambition, responsibility, and the loneliness of every creature cast out by its maker.

Two centuries later, Frankenstein endures because its questions only grow louder. Who is the monster: the abandoned creation, or the man who refused to answer for it? The novel moves from the lecture halls of Ingolstadt to the snows of the Alps and the wastes of the far north, and at every turn it asks how far knowledge may reach before it destroys what it loves.

The tale is told as a story within a story — Captain Walton's letters enclosing Victor's confession, which in turn encloses the Creature's own. This edition gathers it into six movements, from the stranger on the ice to the pursuit's bitter end. Step inside, and meet the modern Prometheus and his creature face to face.