ajmatt blog

If you are an English major lost in a corporate world that doesn’t value your vast knowledge of British literature, looking for a way to return to your college glory days (when “work” meant reading Gulliver’s Travels or Wuthering Heights), and want to do so in a way that is easy and can be done in limited spare time, I recommend The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein. (The corporate world also may not appreciate your ability to write long sentences with excessive punctuation.)

Technically, The Monsters is nonfiction (biography). There are notes and a bibliography, but they are at the end and do not distract while reading (in-text notes are for the real students), and add to the illusion that you are ingesting fact.

Realistically, reading this book is like reading early nineteenth century tabloids. It covers serious topics like crazy feminists, backstabbing, infidelity, famous bachelor-playboys, spies, tragic early deaths, and fevered writing sessions (okay, maybe those wouldn’t make the papers). Despite the gossip fodder, this book will make you look brainy on public transportation, always a plus.

I do wish the authors hadn’t strayed into literary analysis. I read Frankenstein at least three times in college, and was not interested in the Hooblers’ interpretation. I skimmed those parts thinking, “When will they get back to the Shelleys?”

I also couldn’t turn off my editor. The writing wasn’t horrible, I just wished the authors would use more authoritative language. One can only trip over the words “clearly,” “appeared,” and “seemed” so many times within one binding.

I finished the book feeling that 90% of what I read could be accurate, but I didn’t care because it read like historical fiction. And it left me wanting more—specifically, to buy a copy of Mary Shelley’s diaries.