The Creature was not born of hate but of an amalgamation of the pain felt by a husband who lost his wife. Mary Shelley was born to a father mourning the loss of his wife, and left with a mirror image of her. I often wonder how he must have glanced down at her living portrait as he walked by: was it with love? A sparkle in his eye for the last remnant of his life’s greatest treasure? A doting, paternal care for the one who so resembled the woman who made wintry evenings brigh

There is a moment for me, when reading a piece of writing, when art breaches the boundary between self-expression and embodiment. Many works eventually approach this threshold. But while reading Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, there is no such boundary—no singular moment when the work transforms from fiction into something more intimate. There is no moment of genuine embodiment because the entire novel reads like a poem of mourning, a eulogy, a confes

“I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him” — Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart I’ve encountered many ghosts in my life. Not all of them friendly. Not all of them dead. My father is dead in every way except the physical. His heart still beats. His lungs still fill with air. He moves through his days beneath the same sun as I do. The man lives. The father does not. I killed him. For years, I carried him like a diseased limb—attached to