There is an author adage that goes: write what you know.
In speculative fiction, that can be difficult to do. Do we know Dark Lords or Hobbits? Do we know vampires and werewolves? Do we know demons and angels? Or aliens? Or Mord Wraiths? Or the Others? Speculative fiction writers must use their imaginations to build believable worlds and characters. They have nothing to base their creations on other than themselves. What does that say about our authors, eh? Ha!
That said, what if these creatures truly did exist? And what if our authors did know them?
Widely considered by many to be the first science fiction novel, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is a quintessential read for everyone. I first read it as a college senior in a class titled Feminism in Science Fiction. It was an interesting read for many reasons. The questions it raised. The characters involved. The mystery of the monster.
But what if Mary Shelley had met the monster when she was a child? And that meeting informed her novel? And what would the monster think if, over centuries, he had to watch his story unfold in multiple mediums?
Here is a bit more about A Monster’s Notes by Laurie Sheck:
What if Mary Shelley had not invented Frankenstein’s monster but had met him when she was a girl of eight, sitting by her mother’s grave, and he came to her unbidden? What if their secret bond left her forever changed, obsessed with the strange being whom she had discovered at a time of need? What if he were still alive in the twenty-first century?
This bold, genre-defying book brings us the “monster” in his own words. He recalls how he was “made” and how Victor Frankenstein abandoned him. He ponders the tragic tale of the Shelleys and the intertwining of his life with that of Mary (whose fictionalized letters salt the narrative, along with those of her nineteenth-century intimates) in this riveting mix of fact and poetic license. He takes notes on all aspects of human striving—from the music of John Cage to robotics to the Northern explorers whose lonely quest mirrors his own—as he tries to understand the strange race that made yet shuns him, and to find his own freedom of mind.
In the course of the monster’s musings, we also see Mary Shelley’s life from her childhood through her elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley, her writing of Frankenstein, the births and deaths of her children, Shelley’s famous drowning, her widowhood, her subsequent travels and life’s work, and finally her death from a brain tumor at age fifty-four. The monster’s fierce bond with Mary and the tale of how he ended up in her fiction is a haunted, intense love story, a story of two beings who can never forget each other.
A Monster’s Notes is Sheck’s most thrilling work to date, a luminous meditation on creativity and technology, on alienation and otherness, on ugliness and beauty, and on our need to be understood.
A Monster’s Notes is an unusually told tale. The poet in Sheck has creatively taken the Frankenstein monster and given him a voice, one the reader gets to know through a series of essays and notes on a variety of different topics. To read an excerpt from the new novel, click HERE!
A Monster’s Notes by Laurie Sheck is in fine bookstores today!
