Frankenstein Book Review: Mary Shelley’s Classic Endures!

“Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.”

Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus: The Monster I Thought I Knew

I met Frankenstein’s monster long before I met Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel. Like most people, my introduction came through the distorted lens of pop culture—comic book adaptations where the creature was a grunting, bolt-necked brute, and old Universal horror films where Boris Karloff stumbled around with his arms outstretched like a sleepwalking linebacker. The monster I knew couldn’t speak beyond moans and groans. He was simple. Violent. Mindless.

Then I cracked open Frankenstein as a first-year university student, and everything I thought I knew exploded like one of Victor’s galvanism experiments gone wrong.

The creature wasn’t mindless—he was eloquent. He wasn’t born evil—he was abandoned and made monstrous via rejection. And the real horror? It wasn’t about a reanimated corpse at all. It was about a deadbeat dad who created life and then immediately noped the hell out, leaving his “child” to figure out existence alone while everyone he loved paid the price for his cowardice.

This Frankenstein book review is going to explore why Shelley’s 1818 novel remains not just relevant, but prophetic. We’ll dig into the plot, dissect the characters, examine the themes, and talk about what works brilliantly and what… well, doesn’t quite land. Hopefully I can do this classic novel justice.

The Story: A Russian Nesting Doll of Horror

The Frame: Letters from the Edge of the World

The novel opens with Captain Robert Walton writing letters to his sister Margaret from his ship, which is stuck in Arctic ice. Walton’s chasing glory by trying to reach the North Pole—already we’re seeing Shelley’s pattern of ambitious men doing stupid things for fame.

While trapped, Walton’s crew spots a massive figure on a dog sled racing across the ice. The next day, they rescue a half-frozen man: Victor Frankenstein. When Victor recovers enough to speak and recognizes Walton’s obsessive ambition, he decides to tell his story as a warning. That’s when we dive into the real narrative.

Victor’s Tale: How to Ruin Everything in Five Easy Steps

Step 1: Have a Perfect Childhood

Victor Frankenstein grows up in Geneva with loving parents, his adopted sister/cousin Elizabeth Lavenza (their relationship changes depending on which edition you’re reading), and his best friend Henry Clerval. Everything’s golden until his mother Caroline dies of scarlet fever while nursing Elizabeth back to health. This sends Victor into a death-obsessed spiral that will destroy literally everyone he loves.

Step 2: Go to University and Discover Something You Shouldn’t

At the University of Ingolstadt, Victor becomes consumed with natural philosophy and chemistry. He figures out how to create life (Shelley wisely never explains exactly how, because that would age terribly). He spends months in feverish isolation, assembling his creature from corpses like the world’s most disturbing jigsaw puzzle.

Step 3: Succeed, Then Immediately Abandon Your Creation

One stormy night—because of course it’s stormy—Victor brings his creature to life. The moment those yellow eyes open, Victor is horrified and runs away, abandoning his eight-foot-tall “newborn” with no guidance, no explanation, nothing. He falls into a mental breakdown and is nursed back to health by Henry Clerval. The creature, meanwhile, disappears into the world.

Step 4: Let Innocent People Die Rather Than Confess

Victor gets a letter: his youngest brother William has been murdered. Racing home to Geneva, he spots his creature lurking near the murder scene and knows immediately who’s responsible. But instead of confessing, he lets the family servant Justine Moritz be tried, convicted, and executed for the crime. His excuse? His story is too “unbelievable.” Translation: he’s a coward.

Step 5: Meet Your Monster and Make Things Worse

Victor and the creature finally meet on an Alpine glacier. That’s when we get the creature’s side of the story—and it’s heartbreaking.

The Creature’s Story: The Saddest Education Ever

After being abandoned, the creature wanders into the wilderness, slowly learning about the world through painful trial and error. He discovers fire, learns that humans scream and flee at the sight of him, and eventually finds shelter in a hovel attached to a cottage occupied by the De Lacey family.

For months, the creature secretly watches the De Laceys through a crack in the wall. As they teach their guest Safie to speak French, the creature learns alongside her. He discovers a satchel containing three books: Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, and The Sorrows of Young Werther. These become his entire education in humanity, morality, and emotion.

The creature spends this time helping the family secretly—chopping wood, clearing snow—believing that if he proves himself useful, they might accept him despite his appearance. He’s basically a massive, super-strong puppy trying to earn love through good behavior.

When he finally works up the courage to approach blind old De Lacey (when the others are away), things go well at first. Then the family returns, sees him, and Felix beats him with a stick while everyone screams in terror. Later, when the creature saves a drowning girl, her father shoots him, assuming he’s attacking her.

These rejections transform the creature from benevolent to murderous. He sought out Victor, discovered that little William was Victor’s younger brother, and strangled the boy in a fit of rage. He planted evidence on Justine, knowing she’d be executed, to multiply Victor’s suffering. His famous declaration captures his transformation: “If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!”

The Companion That Never Was

The creature makes Victor a deal: create a female companion, and he’ll disappear forever to South America. After much agonizing, Victor agrees and travels to England (with the clueless Henry Clerval) to conduct research. He isolates himself on a remote Scottish island to build the female creature.

But as Victor works, terrible thoughts consume him. What if the female is worse than the male? What if they reproduce and create a race of monsters? What if she refuses to go with him? At the crucial moment, Victor sees his creature watching through the window with a hideous grin. In a fit of horror, Victor destroys the incomplete female creature.

The creature’s response is chilling: “I will be with you on your wedding night.”

Victor dumps the remains at sea, but when he returns to shore, he’s arrested for murder. The victim? Henry Clerval, strangled by the creature. Victor suffers a complete mental breakdown.

The Wedding Night Massacre

Victor returns to Geneva and marries Elizabeth, but he’s consumed with dread about the creature’s threat. On their wedding night, Victor sends Elizabeth to their room while he prepares for battle, expecting the creature to attack him.

Instead, he hears Elizabeth scream.

The creature kept his promise in the cruelest way possible—by murdering Elizabeth instead of Victor. Victor’s father Alphonse dies shortly after from grief. Now Victor has lost everyone.

The Final Chase

With nothing left except revenge, Victor pursues his creature across Europe and into the Arctic wasteland. The creature sometimes leaves food and taunting messages to keep Victor alive, wanting to prolong his suffering. That’s where Walton’s ship finds Victor, nearly dead on the ice.

Victor dies aboard the ship, still begging Walton to kill the creature. But his story has its intended effect—Walton, seeing the cost of dangerous ambition, agrees to turn back when his crew threatens mutiny.

After Victor’s death, Walton discovers the creature in Victor’s cabin, weeping over his creator’s body. The creature explains that he always felt remorse but was driven by loneliness and rage. Now that Victor is dead, the creature has lost his purpose. He promises to travel north and destroy himself on a funeral pyre. Then he leaps onto an ice raft and disappears into the darkness.

The Characters: A Gallery of Flawed Humanity (and One Eloquent Monster)

Victor Frankenstein: The World’s Worst Dad

Victor is simultaneously protagonist and villain—a brilliant scientist whose genius is matched only by his complete inability to consider consequences. He’s consumed by his work to the point of isolation, creates life, and then abandons it the moment things get uncomfortable.

What makes Victor so frustrating is his consistent cowardice. He lets Justine die rather than confess. He agonizes over moral dilemmas but never makes the difficult choice. He portrays himself as a victim even as his actions destroy everyone around him. He’s the original “missing missing reasons” parent—unable to see how his abandonment created the very monster he fears.

The Creature: The Most Human Character

Here’s the twisted brilliance: Frankenstein’s creature is more eloquent, more emotionally honest, and more sympathetic than his creator. He enters the world as a blank slate—no innate evil, just desperate loneliness. His self-education through observation and reading gives him sophisticated language and philosophical depth. When he speaks, it’s in formal, almost biblical language: “Believe me, Frankenstein, I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity.”

The creature’s vegetarianism (he explicitly doesn’t eat meat) makes his murders more pointed—he kills not from instinct but from calculated revenge. His transformation from innocent to murderer is tragic precisely because we understand it. Every rejection, every act of violence against him, pushes him further from humanity until he becomes what everyone already assumed he was.

Robert Walton: The Man Who Learns

Captain Walton serves as Victor’s mirror—another ambitious man chasing glory through dangerous scientific exploration. But unlike Victor, Walton learns when to stop. He chooses his crew’s lives over his ambitions, becoming the successful version of what Victor could have been.

The Women: Shelley’s Tragic Commentary

Elizabeth Lavenza, Justine Moritz, and Caroline Frankenstein are all victims of the men’s conflicts. Elizabeth is idealized to the point of sainthood, described as Victor’s “possession” and “pretty present.” She has almost no agency and dies because of a conflict she never understood.

Justine represents the powerless—manipulated into a false confession and executed for a crime she didn’t commit while Victor stays silent. Her wrongful death serves as Shelley’s critique of how society treats the poor and expendable.

Caroline’s self-sacrificial death nursing Elizabeth triggers Victor’s death-obsession. These women represent the collateral damage of masculine ambition—a theme that feels depressingly relevant today.

Henry Clerval: The Road Not Taken

Clerval represents balance—a scholar interested in languages and human culture rather than dominating nature. His loyalty to the increasingly unstable Victor shows genuine friendship. His murder represents the destruction of Victor’s last connection to normal human relationships.

The De Laceys: The Family That Could Have Been

This family represents everything the creature wants but can never have. Blind old De Lacey is symbolically important—his blindness allows him to judge the creature by his words rather than appearance. Felix’s violent reaction when he sees the creature shows how appearance overrides reason, even in otherwise good people.

The Themes: More Than Just Monster Mash

Romanticism vs. Enlightenment: The Ultimate Criticism

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein as a writer weaned on ideals of the Romantic era responding to Enlightenment ideals (I’m paraphrasing from the Annotated Edition here). The Enlightenment championed reason, scientific progress, and humanity’s power to understand and control nature. Victor embodies this perfectly—he believes science can conquer death itself, and bend the laws of nature to his will.

The novel is Shelley’s critique of that hubris. Victor’s rational, scientific approach creates horror precisely because it ignores emotion, responsibility, and natural limits. The Romantic movement emphasized emotion, nature’s power, and the dangers of unchecked rationality—all themes that permeate the novel.

Nature in Frankenstein isn’t just scenery—it’s a character that provides solace when science fails. When Victor is consumed by guilt and obsession, only nature’s grandeur temporarily relieves his suffering. The creature finds peace in the wilderness but suffers in human society. This reflects the Romantic belief that civilization corrupts natural goodness.

Parental Responsibility and Abandonment

The creature’s plea—”Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous”—cuts to the heart of the novel’s central question: what do creators owe their creations? Victor brings life into the world but refuses to nurture it, leading directly to tragedy. It’s the ultimate deadbeat dad story, where the abandoned child becomes violent not because of inherent evil but because of parental neglect.

This theme resonates differently now than in 1818. We’re creating artificial intelligence, genetic modifications, and technologies we barely understand. Like Victor, we’re often more excited about whether we can do something than whether we should.

The Dangers of Unchecked Ambition

Victor, Walton, and even the creature are driven by desires that consume them—scientific glory, Arctic exploration, and acceptance, respectively. Victor’s isolation during his research mirrors modern academic and scientific culture, where the pressure to achieve and discover can override ethical considerations.

The novel asks: at what point does ambition become destructive? When does the pursuit of knowledge harm rather than help?

What Makes Us Human?

This might be the novel’s most enduring question. The creature, despite his monstrous appearance, displays eloquence, emotion, moral reasoning, and desire for connection—everything we consider human. Meanwhile, Victor becomes increasingly selfish, destructive, and inhuman in his single-minded pursuits.

Shelley forces us to question whether humanity is about appearance, origin, or behavior. The “monster” often acts more human than the humans.

My Review: Brilliant, Frustrating, Essential

What Works (Most of It)

The Narrative Structure Is Genius

Shelley’s nested narratives—Walton’s story containing Victor’s story containing the creature’s story—creates layers of unreliability that make us work for the truth. We’re getting Victor’s version of events, filtered through Walton’s interpretation, and shaped by their own biases and agendas. It’s sophisticated storytelling that most contemporary novels don’t attempt.

The Creature Is Perfect

Shelly created perhaps the most sympathetic “monster” in literature. His eloquence, his self-education, his transformation from innocent to vengeful—it all works beautifully. The sections told from his perspective are the novel’s strongest, most emotionally resonant parts. When he says, “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend,” I believe him completely.

The Philosophical Depth

This isn’t just a horror story—it’s a meditation on creation, responsibility, prejudice, and what it means to be human. Shelley was 18 when she conceived this. That’s insane. The novel grapples with ethical dilemmas we’re still trying to answer about scientific hubris, parental responsibility, the evils in human nature, and the treatment of outcasts.

The Prophetic Quality

Shelley essentially invented science fiction by grounding her horror in scientific possibility rather than supernatural magic. In our age of genetic engineering, AI, and bioethics debates, Frankenstein feels more relevant than ever. We’re still asking whether we should create things just because we can.

The Psychological Complexity

Victor’s guilt, the creature’s rage, Walton’s ambition—these aren’t simple emotions. Characters contradict themselves, make terrible choices for understandable reasons, and suffer consequences that feel earned rather than arbitrary. It’s messy and human in the best way.

What Doesn’t Quite Work

Victor Is Exhaustingly Passive

Look, I get that Victor’s cowardice is the point. But holy hell, does it get frustrating watching him make the worst possible choice at every turn. He lets Justine die. He destroys the female creature at the worst possible moment. He consistently prioritizes his own comfort over others’ lives. By the end, I wanted to shake him.

There’s “flawed protagonist” and there’s “guy who watches everyone die because he won’t speak up.” Victor crosses that line repeatedly. It’s realistic—people really are this cowardly—but it’s exhausting to read.

The Women Are Disappointingly Passive

I know Shelley was writing in 1818 and challenging gender norms for her time. But Elizabeth and the other women exist primarily to die and motivate the men. Elizabeth’s entire character is “perfect, beautiful, and waiting for Victor.” She gets one moment of agency (her letter questioning if Victor loves another) before becoming a plot device.

Shelley—whose mother wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—could have done more here. Then again, maybe the women’s helplessness is part of her critique of masculine ambition’s collateral damage.

The Pacing Gets Wonky

The middle section, where the creature tells his story, is gripping. But the ending rushes through the chase sequence in a way that feels abrupt after the careful build-up. The deaths of Clerval, Elizabeth, and Alphonse happen in rapid succession without the emotional weight they deserve.

I think Shelley wanted to show Victor’s world collapsing quickly, but it reads a bit like she was trying to wrap things up rather than letting the tragedy breathe.

Some Plot Conveniences Are Hard to Swallow

The creature somehow learns to read and speak perfectly fluent French (and English) by observing one family for a few months. He finds a convenient satchel containing exactly the books that will shape his worldview. Victor happens to be arrested exactly where Clerval’s body washes up.

These conveniences don’t ruin the novel, but they do remind you it’s a story rather than letting you sink completely into the world.

The Wrap Up

Here’s the thing about Frankenstein: it’s not perfect. Victor’s passivity is frustrating. The women deserved better. Some plot points strain credulity.

But none of that matters because what Shelley achieved at 18 years old is extraordinary. She created an entirely new genre. She wrote a novel that’s simultaneously Gothic horror, science fiction, philosophical treatise, and psychological drama. She gave us questions we’re still trying to answer and a “monster” more human than most actual humans in literature.

The gap between what I expected (grunting monster, mad scientist, simple horror) and what I got (eloquent philosophical tragedy about creation and responsibility) remains one of the most profound reading experiences I’ve had. Pop culture has distorted Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into something almost unrecognizable (though I do have a lot of love for Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 cinematic endeavor). Still, this makes reading the actual novel even more powerful!

If you’re approaching Frankenstein for the first time, forget everything you think you know from movies and comics. This isn’t about a bolt-necked brute terrorizing villagers. It’s about an abandoned child becoming monstrous because no one would give him a chance. It’s about a creator who destroys everything he loves through cowardice. It’s about ambition without ethics, intelligence without wisdom, and the question of what we owe the things we bring into existence.

Over 200 years later, we’re still trying to answer the questions this teenager asked during a weird summer vacation and a ghost story competition during bad weather with her husband poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, the infamous poet Lord Byron, and Dr. John Polidori, to see who could come up with the best eerie tale. I think you’d all agree, Mary won hands down.

Rating: 9/10 – A brilliant, flawed, and absolutely essential horror novel. Modern readers who disagree with me are WRONG. This is the kind of novel that changes how you think about creation, responsibility, and what it means to be human.

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Have you read Frankenstein? Did the novel surprise you compared to how pop culture portrays it? Are you looking forward to the Guillermo Del Toro Netflix offering? Let me know in the comments!