Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818 and revised it for an 1831 edition. This review is of the 1818 edition, curiously labelled as an uncensored version.

The novel begins with a series of letters between Captain Robert Dalton and his sister as he sets out to explore the North Pole. His ship gets stuck in ice, and he sees a man on a sled race by in the distance. They eventually rescue the man. He is a haggard Victor Frankenstein, and he tells Dalton his story.

Frankenstein tells of growing up in Italy and then travelling to study chemistry at the University of Ingolstadt in Germany. While studying there, he secretly learns how to reanimate life and creates his monster, but he is repulsed by his creation and flees.

When Frankenstein gets back home, his much younger brother is murdered. A maid is blamed, but Frankenstein suspects it is his monster. He can’t prove it was, but he worries if he told anyone of his creation, they would think him insane. In grief, he travels to the Alps, but the monster tracks him down.

The monster can now articulate its intelligence. He tells Frankenstein what happened after he abandoned him. The narrative is now a story within a story within a story. This allows Shelley to let the reader into the monster’s mind. After telling his story, the monster demands that Frankenstein create him a mate, or he will exact revenge on Frankenstein’s family, friends and fiancé. You’ll have to read the novel to find out if he does.

The novel is about outliers from society. First, we have Frankenstein, whose scientific interests and reanimation experiments keep him separate from society. He may appear to be a normal member of the land-holding gentry, but his interior self is removed from society firstly by scientific curiosity and then fear of what he has created. The second outlier is, of course, the monster whose appearance evokes terror in others. He will never be accepted as an equal in society.

Frankenstein has been called the first science-fiction novel. Shelley wrote the novel when she and her husband, Lord Byron, challenged each other to write the best horror novel. (He did not finish his.) Frankenstein has very little actual or pseudo-science in it. However, it does have Frankenstein experimenting with processes as he creates the monster. For this reason, it can be called science fiction.   

Why the 1818 version was labelled as uncensored would be a mystery to many modern-day readers, as there is nothing that would attract the ire of today’s censors. There is no gore or sex, but when it was written, who knows what might have been seen as offensive? 

What struck this reviewer is how different the novel is from the films he thinks he has seen and the Frankenstein legend in his mind. There is no scene of a lab in a castle during a thunderstorm where electricity from lightning is used to animate the monster (this may have been only in the comedy Young Frankenstein). There are no grave robbers digging up bodies for Frankenstein to use. The monster is not chased and attacked by a mob of villagers. Most importantly, the monster is articulate and intelligent, not the dumb, feckless movie creation. Readers of the novel will empathise with the monster, while the movies just evoke some initial sympathy for him, which terror then squashes.

Shelley’s prose is very much from a different time. It is slightly dense and heavy on description, but it is accessible. A reader should start to engage with its style after a few pages. It is very much a character-driven novel as it delves into the minds of Frankenstein and his monster. By today’s standards, it is not that horrific.

The generosity and altruism of the landed gentry in the novel are hard to believe. Shelley’s privileged upbringing probably gave her a very different picture of the struggle for survival of the less fortunate as they battled the greed and selfishness of the rich. After all, slavery was still occurring around the world when she wrote this novel, and convicts were still being transported to Australia. Imperialism was rife. Shelley seems to have had a very romantic view of society.

Even though it was written two centuries ago, Frankenstein is still a great read. It is a novel that evokes empathy for those on the margins of society, even if that society is romanticised.

The Dark Man, by Referral and Less Pleasant Tales, is a collection of ‘horror’ short stories. I put the horror in quotation marks as the stories are not that horrific. They are more thriller stories in the tone of The Twilight Zone, with a bit of added humour. There is no blood, gore, or scary shocks, but plenty of twists. Most stories are about people getting their just deserts, so readers can feel good about what happens to the evil characters.

The title story, The Dark Man by Referral, is a prime example of bad people getting their just deserts. It is a tale of a boy whose mother is in a relationship with an abusive man. The boy meets a mysterious dark man who gives him a toy that is not as innocuous as it looks, at least to his mother’s partner.

Confessions of a Pod Person would make a great movie. It is Invasion of the Body Snatchers from the point of view of the body snatchers. Unlike in the movie, their invasion fails, and the pod people must deal with the consequences. This was my favourite story in the collection.

Other stories include Bad Meat, a zombie tale of sorts. Retail Therapy will have readers thinking about justifiable homicide as a customer endlessly tries to bargain with a shop owner. The Eight-Beat Bar is about being tortured by a musical earworm, like having Hotel California constantly groaning on in your head until you really want to ‘check out’.

The collection contains 20 stories. Some are as little as a paragraph, while others are much more substantial. McKenzie concludes the book with a heartfelt outline of what inspired him to write each story. He tells us that he gave up writing for years but now has his muse back. All the stories have been published in other magazines and collections. Even though the stories were written over decades, they seem to belong together.  

I enjoyed reading this collection and recommend it to anyone who has had a bad day and wants to see someone get their just deserts.