A Monster's Notes

What if Mary Shelley had not invented Frankenstein's monster at all 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 she'd 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 Mary's (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 Gertrude Stein 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.

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.


Genre: Literary Fiction