Frankenstein

This book is an adaptation of the classic novel Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein is consumed by his desire to discover the secrets of life. After several years of research, Victor feverishly constructs a man out of old body parts and brings him to life. Victor is immediately horrified by his ambitious creation, and flees his apartment in remorse. The newborn monster disappears from Frankenstein's laboratory and enters the world as an outcast, struggling with his own identity. This easy-to-read adaptation is guaranteed to hook beginning readers not yet ready to tackle the original.

Frankenstein, loved by many decades of readers and praised by such eminent literary critics as Harold Bloom, seems hardly to need a recommendation. If you haven't read it recently, though, you may not remember the sweeping force of the prose, the grotesque, surreal imagery, and the multilayered doppelgänger themes of Mary Shelley's masterpiece. As fantasy writer Jane Yolen writes of this (the reviewer's favorite) edition, "The strong black and whites of the main text [illustrations] are dark and brooding, with unremitting shadows and stark contrasts. But the central conversation with the monster--who owes nothing to the overused movie image … but is rather the novel's charnel-house composite--is where [Barry] Moser's illustrations show their greatest power ... The viewer can all but smell the powerful stench of the monster's breath as its words spill out across the page. Strong book-making for one of the world's strongest and most remarkable books." Includes an illuminating afterword by Joyce Carol Oates.