Frankenstein Meets Wuthering Heights

 

Her Creation

by Jeneane O'Riley 

 This book has several content warnings at the front, and every one of them is earned. If any of them concern you, this is not the book for you. 

'Her Creation' is a feminine (not necessarily feminist) retelling of the Frankenstein story, in which young Victoria grows up with her eccentric doctor father in a run-down castle in a forest where he alternates between perfecting his surgical techniques on cadavers and stitching up the wealthy landowners' wastrel sons after their drunken reckless exploits. Victoria is dreaming of learning reincarnation to restore her much-missed mother, and assumes her father is working toward the same end. As with many modern retellings, there are female friendships to counter the traditional solitary-genius trope, nods to same-sex relationships that wouldn't be discussed openly in that era, and other nods to modern sensibilities that were not, for the most part, particularly intrusive or distracting (ymmv). 

The framing is of a female scholar signing on with a shipboard expedition to map the great northern wastes, when they find a very large, much-scarred man seemingly half-frozen on the ice. The scholar keeps a journal about her patronizing and patriarchal treatment by the crew that soon elides, after meeting the monster and his mystery-woman maker, into a recounting of how the unlikely pair ended up there. There are some philosophical musings from the aging Doctor Frankenstein about the nature of life, politics, morality, and the responsibilities of healers. Much of the language and atmosphere is redolent of the original text, though filtered through a feminine narrator..

The erotic fascination with the monster is writ larger upon the page than in any previous retelling I've encountered. The monster's obsession with her is also deeply explored. Think Wuthering Heights meets, well, Frankenstein. If you're reading for the slow-burn, dark, sexual energy, you won't be disappointed.

If you're not thus enamoured, the scholar seen so briefly at start and end may feel like the more interesting character. While the fiction of her recording Victoria's story continues in dated and located log book entries, the story and voice is all Victoria's (or, occasionally, the monster's) to carry. It starts too early in Victoria's young life and goes too long on too little forward motion beyond the passage of time, with too much interior musing between lines of dialogue or brief action sequences. Victoria's actions and reactions don't always seem credible. Too many pages in the first half are taken up with circular anguished emoting that leads nowhere, while the narrative largely glosses over her reaction/response to a very realistic and repeatedly traumatizing situation that is certain to be quite triggering for unwary readers. The writing is occasionally clumsy and self-contradicting, throwing us out of the fictive historical-seeming world with words like 'okay' and phrases about 'outing' someone dropped into the midst of scenes that should be the most immersive of all. It needed a sensitive copy-edit to keep the author's enthusiastic prose from charging past peak emotional and sensual impacts in a gush of weakening words and phrases.

And yet... there are moments, short speeches, a touch here or a gaze there, filled with love and depth and searing clarity that make it worth reading to the end. 

#ThanksNetGalley #HerCreation #FrankensteinRetold #DarkFantasy #erotic #sensual #scary