Frankenstein

Author: Mary Shelley

A new edition of Mary Shelley's 1818 classic, Frankenstein.

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Though Frankenstein is very much a product of the Gothic and Romantic literary movements, it also can be thought of as the first true science fiction story, and has been highly influential on subsequent literature and popular culture, spawning a complete genre of horror stories, films, and plays.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and feminist activist Mary Wollstonecraft.

Posts about this title from DocoftheDarkArts

DocoftheDarkArts
Bob Stuntz
• Feb 14

Poll:
April - June 2026 Book Club Picks

Hi everyone, very excited to do our poll for the next quarter of our book club! While I'm sure most of you are aware, I thought I'd run through what we did differently this time:

• Proposals in a forum format where you provided the synopsis and rationale with content warnings
• Reactions/comments were provided
• I went with less books for the poll this time so the vote would be less diluted (had 13 books last time, picked 9 this time). We can decrease next round if needed.

You all had some amazing selections. Here's how I picked them out (for full transparency):

• I looked at all the reactions, comments, and the tally of each. I then went through the comments to see what were "substantial" comments. For example, people saying it was really good, sounded great, versus comments about how to post in the forum. I also looked at how many people said they had read versus had not.
  • From this, there were three standouts
• I then look at the next tier of aggregated reactions/comments (books in the teens). I did all of the above again, I tried to make sure we had a variety of authors (don't want two of the same author), book sizes (I'm ok with one really big book per cycle, but also want them to be reasonable and not have all chokers), and a variety of people who made suggestions.
  • There were three that made it in here.
• Everything else was pretty close in terms of objective stuff, so for the last three selections I looked at all of the above and then I picked out books that I was really interested in -(sorry, there should be some perks here) as well as positive comments.

So, see below. Vote for your top three choices. Voting will close on February 28, selections announced March 1!

9 books