Frankenstein

First of all I have to say that this book really did give me a nightmare. Which is ridiculous, considering when I was reading it that I was thinking “ha, why did people back then think this was that scary?” considering how not new it is to us now, with all the horror movie that we have. I suppose back then it really must have been a new concept though. But anyway! Right after I had read that the monster was trying to force Victor to make a female, and Victor then tore the body apart after changing his mind, I dreamed that a funeral procession was walking down my street, with piece of body parts of three different recently dead people stuck together to make three different bodies that looked human enough to carry openly without a coffin through the street. And this dream terrified me, I didn’t go back to sleep after that. So I guess while I might not find this book necessarily terrifying, it definitely affected my subconscious. I have to say I was so surprised to find out that nearly none of the Hollywood imagery that we think about when we think of the name Frankenstein can be found in the original book. There wasn’t even a bringing to life scene, no electricity, no nothing (and I wonder if Shelley was merely saving herself the trouble of being told that the way she might have thought up would never work practically.) And I was also surprised that the monster talked! And quite eloquently I must say, though I seemed to doubt the validity of his ability to talk and read perfectly only after a few months of spying at a window. However! Despite that, I did enjoy the text and I am quite glad it contained nothing of the elements that we see in Hollywood which are quite cartoonish to us at this point. I was also looking forward to, and surprised not to find, a part I had seen in a Frankenstein play, where Victor as a young boy experiment on dead animals that he finds, I remember in the play he tries and fails to bring a dead collie to life as a child, and for some reason I was sure that that was actually in the book, that he worked his way up to bringing a human to life by experimenting on animals that he wanted to live again, as a child. So I was rather disappointed on finding no such part. But no matter! I did find this book a good read despite the nightmare, and to be a classic worthwhile of experiencing the original version.