Monster: A Novel of Frankenstein by Dave Zeltserman
My rating: 3/5 cats
retellings work best when they pinpoint a lack in the original text; a moment that is ambiguous or a lapse in action where a story could have fallen through the cracks. but for this technique to work, the source material kind of has to remain intact. wide sargasso sea lays out “what led bertha to her attic prison madness??” windward heights asks “what happened during heathcliff’s three years away, oh, and what if wuthering heights had taken place somewhere much warmer?” stress of her regard, which is not an adaptation of a book, as such, but an even more ambitious adaptation of the biographies of poets, makes the tumultuous lives and mysterious deaths of the romantics supernaturally explicable. but they all respect the source material. they don’t get so carried away by their own perspective that they forget the limitations imposed by their source material. with monster, there is too much rewriting of the original, and it doesn’t so much “fill in the pieces” or “reverse the traditional interpretations” so much as it revises the text to suit the author’s wishes.
although, i suppose that for this particular text, frankenstein, which is about the overstepping of one’s human limitations and trying to play god, this is entirely appropriate. but we all know what happened to victor frankenstein when he meddled out of his depths.
so it is an interesting premise:
frankenstein told from the perspective of the “monster.” not the newly-created being, but the brain-part of the creation, friedrich hoffmann, who was drugged, accused of murder, and executed by being broken on the wheel. when he is revived, he is in the body of an eight-foot tall monster, while retaining his memory and his humanity.
the thing that makes frankenstein so interesting is its moral ambiguity. victor frankenstein uses science to create life, but then doesn’t take responsibility for what he has created. and like many neglected children of indifferent parents, his monster goes wild, seeks love and acceptance from other families, and when they are appalled by his appearance, eventually he goes “bad” and lashes out. but he doesn’t start out “evil,” and frankenstein himself is not an entirely innocent character. the interesting thing about frankenstein is the dynamic between the creator and the created, and the revulsion and responsibility inherent in their relationship.
it was never a story of good vs. evil.
and this is where zeltzerman’s story goes off the rails a little, for me. in his retelling, victor frankenstein is purely evil. and friedrich-monster is a good “man” in an extreme situation. which, fine, if we are just going to take the movie-version of frankenstein: scientist good, monster bad, which steamrolls all the complexities out, and reverse it, this is what we would get. but then…vampire-werewolves? satanists?? orgies orchestrated by the marquis de sade? murals that come to life and depict decadent sexual monstrosities? naked girls as tables? it is like dorian gray at the playboy mansion. and—of course , where would a story like this be without monster cock? you know what they say about eight-foot-tall patchwork reanimated corpses. the ladies cannot get enough…
this would have been more effective if it had been a stricter retelling. frankenstein and his monster do not hang out together in the original. not as friends, not as creator and captive, there is just no period where they are together for an extended period of time. i could deal with friedrich-monster encountering the satanists and the vampires because there is that gap where he is off going wild in the woods and who knows what he is doing?? he could well have been living it up as the king of the satanists—who can say? like heathcliff’s missing three years, i could have accepted this filling in of the narrative gap. but i have problems with the rest of it. this is more like frankenstein fanfic – like “frankenstein is good, but what if there were more orgies in it??”
okay, so that might be a little snarky. because there are parts that i liked—the overall tone is fine, as an adaptation; it’s not as good as shelley, but it feels similar enough. including real-people like samuel hahnemann and the marquis de sade and shelley herself is also a cute little flourish that i appreciate. i suppose i just have problems with retellings that deviate from the original. which is a personal peeve. oh, and also, the ending. peeve city.
this isn’t terrible by any stretch, it was just not as tight of a retelling as it could have been.
my month of meh-horror continues…
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