Horror: The 100 Best Books Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the lost soul. Mary Shelley, desiring to create a ghost story, wrote instead what Brian Aldiss calls "the first . . . science fiction", a novel which Shelley herself wanted to "speak to the mysterious fears of our nature". The novel was conceived in a dream in which she saw "the hideous phantasm, of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion . . ." That dream followed long late night conversations with her husband, the poet Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori, Byron's doctor. The conversations ranged through vampires, Darwin, and the supernatural and, at Byron's suggestion, they were to have a contest with the four of them writing ghost stories. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is an epistolary novel with overtones of the Gothic and the Romantic. While the implication is that the hero of the piece (or the anti-hero) is the young doctor Frankenstein, it is to the monster the modern reader more naturally turns. He has the most compelling speeches, is the wiser of the characters, and is the most noble in his own strange way. As Joyce Carol Oates has written of him, "Surely one of the secrets of Frankenstein , which helps account for its abiding appeal, is the demon's patient, unquestioning, utterly faithful, and utterly human love for his irresponsible creator." Together Frankenstein the creator and the monster, his creation, are a whole: shadow selves. One does not exist without the other. It is why neither the monster nor Frankenstein's bride can last. The two -- man and giant -- need, deserve, and find one another. " I shall be with you on your wedding night ," the monster cries. It is a promise, horrendous in its outcome, but tauntingly sexual in its undertones. Frankenstein was published anonymously in 1818 and republished -- with some changes -- under Mary Shelley's name and with an introduction in 1831. Movies, musicals, comic book versions, bowdlerized editions, have all made their mark on the Frankenstein story. In 1984, Barry Moser, America's premier wood engraver, created a limited illustrated version for his Pennyroyal Press based on the first edition. The book was later reprinted for the ordinary buyer by the University of California Press. The pictures provide an intelligent, handsome, and powerful gloss on the book. (There is also a fine if academic afterword by Joyce Carol Oates.) The strong black and whites of the main text 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 of the creature with zipper scars and an oversized blocky head but is rather the novel's charnel-house composite -- is where Moser's illustrations show their greatest power. We see a skull with skin stretched over old bones, wisps of hair, protruding teeth. Taken together, the pictures give the impression of a monologue (which in fact is what that section of the book is). 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. -- JANE YOLEN
    9: [1820] CHARLES MATURIN - Melmoth the Wanderer

    Young John Melmoth attends the deathbed of his miserly uncle and is informed that a member of the family, also called John Melmoth, has been alive since the 16th century, wandering the Earth in search of someone willing to lay down their soul for him. This Melmoth has made a pact with the Devil, exchanging his soul for immortality, but can get out of it if he finds someone miserable enough to sell Melmoth his/her own soul. Young John examines manuscripts and seeks out old stories, and the novel presents several episodes in which Melmoth appears to those in need of aid and is rebuffed. During his quest, Melmoth encounters a sane man imprisoned in a vile insane asylum, a Spaniard entrapped by the Inquisition, an Indian maid