Written when Mary Shelley was just eighteen, Frankenstein remains the most important horror novel ever published. Victor Frankenstein assembles a creature from dead flesh, sparks it to life, and flees in disgust, and the abandoned being, intelligent and aching for love, sets out to make his creator answer for it.
The surprise for new readers is how moving it is. The monster is the most eloquent character in the book, and the true horror is not the science but the abandonment.
