Gothic-Horror Reads to Prepare you for Guillermo del Toro’s FRANKENSTEIN Adaptation
By Mary Kay McBrayer
Courtesy of Peacock
I loved Frankenstein, the novel by Mary Shelley’s, and I loved the 1931 film adaptation. I also love Guillermo del Toro. So, when he announced his own adaptation of Frankenstein, I was wary: it’s already perfect… what do you need to change, and to what end?
I’ll admit, my bar was set extremely high, and it’s my first time hearing the story as a parent. Those are the biases I will claim. Those, and my love for a historical drama. Also my obsession with the Resurrectionists in Edinburgh surgeries. What I hoped was for a full immersion into to the period, costumes and gothic architecture fully present. I got those things. Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro was grotesque and beautiful.
Also… a little bloated at two and a half hours, and in my opinion, Victor’s added childhood backstory tries to get us to sympathize with him. No-no, sir: you played God and didn’t think about what to do after creation. You go stand in the corner. I don’t care how rough your rich French childhood was. Besides, we’re not here for a mad uninformed scientist: I can see that any day all around me. I’m here for the creature’s dynamic character.
But the creature is also too sympathetic—we’re supposed to see a change in him when he experiences love and companionship, the identifying aspects of humanity, in the story’s context. He can’t change to compassionate if he was never violent. (I mean, he is violent, but in justifiable, reactionary ways. Also, Jacob Elordi’s movement as the creature is just awesome. All the performances are excellent.)
All that said, you’re here because you want to see the Frankenstein 2025 movie, and prepare for it with great books! It’s absolutely worth seeing on a big screen—remember, it is gorgeous, and what better way to really investigate the steampunk resurrection than enormously?
While you wait, or after your interest in the classic has been reinvigorated, here are a few books you can check out, from famous works by Mary Shelley herself, books about Mary Shelley’s life, and other effective retellings of Frankenstein.
If you are reading this article, you have probably already read (or been assigned to read) Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the original gangster. But, if you haven’t laid eyes on it since the ninth grade, you might want to revisit it. Not only is it the first science fiction novel, but it was written by an 18-year-old girl at a house party at Lake Geneva. The guests participated in a scary story contest during a storm there, and from that contest came this masterpiece about human mortality, the dangers of playing God (even for scientists and doctors), the responsibility of parents (but especially fathers), and the question of who is allowed a soul. This epistolary novel follows young Doctor Victor Frankenstein is obsessed with creating life. In the industrial period during which doctors were known to accept corpses of dubious sources from which to learn anatomy, Frankenstein creates and brings to life a patchwork non-human—or at least, that’s what he thinks as soon as he realizes success. He runs away, leaving his creation utterly alone and lonely. And the being he created does not take that abandonment lightly.
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Director and writer Guillermo del Toro teamed up with bestselling crime author Chuck Hogan for this novel, which is a tale for lovers of both supernatural thrillers and crime fiction. It follows rookie FBI agent, Odessa Hardwicke, as she defends herself against her own partner, a seasoned detective who suddenly turned violent. She’s relegated to desk duty, but when she takes on a routine assignment unraveling the possessions of a retired agent, she’s thrust into the mystery of the self-proclaimed immortal, Hugo Blackwood….
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If you love Frankenstein, and you love the gothic and macabre, here’s a collection of short stories by the Mary Shelley herself. It includes an essay on a popular ghost legends and a story about a botched immortality experiment—the perfect fit for a reader looking to get spooked by a narrative in a single sitting, multiple times over.
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The subject of this personal memoir is also the runners-up in that storied contest at Lake Geneva. Edward Trelawney records an intimate account of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Mary’s husband—there’s a whole story there, just wait) and Lord Byron (Mary’s maybe lover—there’s a story there, too). Trelawney fell into their literary circle in 1821 at Pisa, and this three-year-long record follows both the poets to their early deaths.
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In this rediscovered classic, one of Mary Shelley’s famous works comes back to life. This novel follows the impact of an unstoppable pandemic and the last man standing, Lionel Vesey. It’s 2073 when her novel starts, but she wrote it in 1826, after the deaths of her husband, stepsister, and two children… so it’s as much about survival as it is about personal grief.
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This is the novel of Mary Shelley’s that is the most socially oriented—it’s a web of relationships between three women all entangled by one man, the Lord Lodore. Lodore’s estranged wife is ruled by aristocratic norms… and her own mother. Lodore’s daughter is completely dependent on him, after being raised in Illinois wilderness. And Fanny Derham, the daughter of Lodore’s childhood friend, is highly educated and independent. This book has been called the “most Austen-like of Mary Shelley’s novels.”
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As with any classic, Frankenstein has been satirized and reimagined to death, but the most celebrated comedic interpretation is without a doubt Mel Brooks’ movie starring Gene Wilder, Young Frankenstein. This book is the story of the making of that movie, narrated by the director (and author) himself… and with that cast of characters, I would bet this book is as funny as that movie.
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Speaking of retellings, this is one that resituates the concept of bringing remains back to life in a contemporary setting with different meaning: Hadi is a scavenger in U.S.-occupied Baghdad. He collects parts of human bodies in hopes that the government will recognize said parts as the people they are, so that they can have a proper burial. He actually completes a full corpse… and then that corpse goes missing. Soon after, murders disrupt the city, and so do reports of a horrific-looking criminal who can’t be killed.
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Okay, one more retelling: you probably heard of Poor Things when the film adaptation (directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring Emma Stone) released in 2023, if not earlier, but in case you didn’t… this postmodern revisioning replaces the traditional monster with Bella Baxter, a beautiful young woman with the mind of an infant. Godwin Baxter (one of the Edinburgh scientists in the same historical setting as the original Dr. Frankenstein) saw his opportunity when he found the drowned body of pregnant Bella… it is disturbing and fascinating, and as the jacket copy proclaims, “a thought-provoking duel between the desires of men and the independence of women.”
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I don’t know about you, but I’ve always wondered what the other writers at that Villa Diodati party on Lake Geneva came up with, even though Frankenstein clearly won the contest. This is one of them. The young gentleman Aubrey is fascinated by the newcomer among England’s social elite, and they travel together through Europe, despite the rumors of vampire killings. When they’re attacked, Ruthven begs Aubrey to keep his death a secret for just one year… and then Ruthven reappears in London, alive and well….
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Dude, if you think Frankenstein is a good story, wait till you hear about the life of its author. I’m serious: she was the daughter of the suffragette Mary Wollstonecraft and the radical philosopher William Godwin. She married the (already married) poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and you already know she hung out in that literary circle and smoked them all when she created Frankenstein. She herself gets brought to life in this exhaustive biography, which tells not only of the four children she had, but three of their deaths and the untimely death of her husband to drowning, too. It’s not a completely tragic story though—the rumor is that she lost her virginity on her mother’s grave. Is it true? You’ll have to read this book to find out.
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“Both timely and terrifying.” –Gregory Macguire, New York Times-bestselling author of Wicked
Pairing free verse with over three hundred pages of black-and-white watercolor illustrations, Mary’s Monster is a unique and stunning biography of Mary Shelley, the pregnant teenage runaway who became one of the greatest authors of all time.
Legend is correct that Mary Shelley began penning Frankenstein in answer to a dare to write a ghost story. What most people don’t know, however, is that the seeds of her novel had been planted long before that night. By age nineteen, she had been disowned by her family, was living in scandal with a married man, and had lost her baby daughter just days after her birth. Mary poured her grief, pain, and passion into the powerful book still revered two hundred years later, and in Mary’s Monster, author/illustrator Lita Judge has poured her own passion into a gorgeous book that pays tribute to the life of this incredible author.
A 2019 NCSS-CBC Notable Social Studies Trade Book A 2019 Amelia Bloomer Project Book
This title has Common Core connections.
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