“Sometimes I tried to imitate the pleasant songs of the birds but was unable. Sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again.”

Is it possible to fall in love with a novel? I ask that seriously. Is it possible? For this is what I feel with Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’. This text written by an 18yearold for a horror story competition has made me feel so young. More than gothic horror, this is gothic romance between the reader and the writer!

With every line, every space, every indentation, that my eyes ran across, I fell more and more in love. The language that Shelley uses is incomparable to any other piece of literature that I have read. She puts this immense sense of despair and romance in both Victor Frankenstein and his Monster, making us choose which one is the most evil. Who is the actual monster in this tragedy? Is it God who abandoned his creation? Or is it the child who curses the world and their parent for abandoning them.

Man as God. God as a college student way in over his head. God as the hubris that afflicted Icarus and Frankenstein alike.

I urge you to read this and fall in love with it that I have. Read it and rethink everything you’ve read before and everything that you will read next!