Frankenstein Book Review: Mary Shelley’s Timeless Gothic Horror and Its Chilling Echoes in 2025 AI and Biotech Debates

In the dim glow of my laptop screen last month, as headlines screamed about rogue AI algorithms deciding crop yields in drought-stricken fields, I cracked open Frankenstein for the third time.

It's 2025, and we're knee-deep in ethics panels dissecting whether silicon souls deserve rights—echoing a debate Mary Shelley ignited two centuries ago with a novel scribbled during a stormy summer on Lake Geneva.

Born in 1797 to firebrand philosopher William Godwin and feminist icon Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley was barely 19 when she birthed this tale, conceived amid opium haze and ghost-story challenges with Byron and Polidori.

A widow by 21, her life was a whirlwind of loss and defiance, much like the tempests that lash her pages.

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus isn't mere spine-tingling yarn—it's a scalpel to the heart of human overreach.

Shelley's thesis pulses through every sodden paragraph: creation without consequence isn't progress; it's a pact with shadows.

Victor Frankenstein, our flawed alchemist, doesn't just stitch flesh—he unmasks the vertigo of playing god in an indifferent universe.

(And if you've ever paused mid-prompt to an AI, wondering if your words summon something irrevocable, you'll feel that pull.)

This review unpacks the gothic layers, from plot's relentless march to themes that haunt today's labs.

Why revisit now?

Because as del Toro's silver-screen beast lumbers into theaters, Shelley's warning sharpens:

hubris doesn't die; it evolves.

A Relentless Pursuit: Spoiler-Free Plot Summary

The frame snaps open on walrus-hunted ice floes, where Captain Walton's ship stalls amid frozen swells.

Letters home introduce Victor Frankenstein, a gaunt Genevan rescued from the brink, his eyes wild with unspoken burdens.

Flash back to sunnier climes: young Victor, cradled in a family of enlightened idealists, devours alchemy texts by Cornelius Agrippa, his mind a forge for impossible fires.

By his late teens, university beckons in Ingolstadt—a cradle of Enlightenment sparks and revolutionary whispers.

Here, Victor sheds boyhood myths for galvanic secrets, his nights blurring into a frenzy of dissected limbs and stolen vigils.

Years compress into a fever: lectures on vitalism clash with solitary toil in attic lairs, where ambition coils like storm clouds.

Then, rupture.

A being stirs—raw, unnamed, a mirror to Victor's fractured soul.

Flight follows, a hemorrhage of guilt propelling him homeward.

But shadows lengthen; letters arrive laced with dread, pulling Victor into a web of vengeance across Alpine passes and Scottish moors.

The creature, eloquent in its isolation, emerges not as brute but interlocutor, demanding reckonings in candlelit huts.

The chase spirals: Orkney isles, Rhine barges, Mont Blanc's echo chambers.

Walton's crew bears witness to Victor's unraveling, his pleas a litany against the void.

No tidy bows here—Shelley's narrative is a Möbius strip of pursuit, where hunter and hunted blur under auroral skies.

Time in Shelley isn't linear; it's a noose tightening with each deferred truth.

The Architects of Ruin: Character Deep Dive

Victor Frankenstein.

Say the name, and you summon not Boris Karloff's bolt-necked icon, but a man whose intellect devours him whole.

Shelley's protagonist isn't a cackling madman—he's a Romantic everyman, steeped in Rousseau's noble savage ideals yet poisoned by Locke’s tabula rasa gone awry.

His ambition?

A noble spark: to pierce death's veil after his mother's passing.

"Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds," he confesses early, his voice a scalpel tracing the psyche's fault lines.

But watch how that spark ignites pyres. Victor's isolation in Ingolstadt—echoing Milton's fallen angels in Paradise Lost, whom Shelley weaves throughout—is no mere plot device; it's psychological autopsy.

He forsakes friends, family, even his betrothed Elizabeth, for the "workshop of filthy creation."

Here, ambition's cost unfurls: somatic delusion, where body and mind fracture under solitary strain.

Psychologists today might nod to Maslow's hierarchy inverted—Victor's self-actualization curdles into solipsism, a cautionary echo in Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, where action without plurality breeds banality's monsters.

I felt a pang reading his rants against fate; they're mine, too, during late-night songwriting binges where verses chase ghosts.

Victor embodies the artist's hubris—the belief that one mind can reorder chaos—yet his downfall whispers: creation demands community, or it devours.

Then, the Creature.

Ah, the misnomer that stings. Shelley's unnamed progeny isn't "monster" but Adam unbound, a tabula rasa inscribed with rejection's acid.

Born articulate, devouring Paradise Lost and Plutarch in a Highland hovel, he craves kinship like oxygen.

"I am malicious because I am miserable," he later intones, a line that guts me every time—raw as Camus' Meursault confronting absurdity in The Stranger, but laced with Lockean nurture's betrayal.

His tragedy?

Empathy's orphan. Abandoned at "birth," he navigates a world of De Lacey exiles and Orkney pitchforks, his eloquence a curse amid fearful mobs.

Physically grotesque—yellow skin, watery eyes—yet inwardly sublime, he mirrors Victor's own deformity: unchecked id against superego's lash.

In their Alpine confrontation, father-son dialectic unfolds, riffing on Hegel's master-slave, where the "slave" demands recognition denied.

The Creature's eloquence flips the script; he's the novel's true philosopher, questioning divine justice amid his patchwork existence.

(Remember that silence from Victor earlier? Here it shatters—the creator's muteness birthed not just flesh, but a rhetoric of revolt, forcing us to ask: who authors the grudge?)

Their dyad haunts because it's intimate: Victor's neglect begets the Creature's rage, a feedback loop of paternal failure.

In my own life, sketching fantasy realms, I've seen how unheeded inner voices—those half-formed characters—rebel on the page.

Shelley nails it: characters aren't foils; they're indictments.

Unraveling Threads: Themes and Symbolism in Depth

Isolation.

It's the novel's marrow, a psychic frostbite that claims limbs and legacies.

Victor's self-exile in pursuit of the "sublime"—that Burkean thrill of terror mingled with awe—isolates him from the "domestic affections" anchoring humanity.

Shelley, orphaned young and widowed early, knew this terrain; her Genevan summer birthed not just Frankenstein, but a manifesto against solitary genius.

Think Woolf's A Room of One's Own, but inverted: Victor's room devours the woman waiting beyond.

Symbolism saturates: the Arctic wastes, where Walton's ship founders, emblemize emotional desolation—a white void swallowing warmth, much like the id's howl in Freud's later cartography.

Mont Blanc looms as Promethean peak, Shelley's nod to her husband's poem, where nature's majesty humbles hubris.

Yet it's the mundane that bites: Victor's fever-dreams, stitching body horror to existential dread, prefiguring Kafka's Metamorphosis—waking to otherness, unchosen.

Creation ethics?

The core wound.

Shelley's epistolary frame indicts unchecked science, her own era's galvanism (Aldini's corpse-jerks at Royal Society demos) fueling Victor's spark.

"Whence, I often ask, did the principle of life proceed?" he muses, channeling Erasmus Darwin's vitalism.

But ethics falter: no consent, no aftermath.

Tie to 2025 biotech fears—CRISPR babies whispered in Shenzhen labs, or neuralinks probing consciousness.

(That revolt from the Creature? It crescendos here, as nurture's neglect births ethical voids we fill with "Frankenfoods" debates—GMO maize engineered for carbon sinks, yet sparking agrarian revolts in COP30 sidebars.)

Nature versus nurture unfurls in the Creature's idyll: peasant cottages teach virtue, but rejection sows savagery.

Shelley flips Malthusian gloom—overpopulation's specter—into philosophical query: are we born blank, or inscribed by world's cruelty?

Echoes in Skinner's behaviorism, or Golding's Lord of the Flies, where civilization's gloss peels to primal.

These threads interlace, not as moral fable, but inquiry: creation's thrill masks abandonment's abyss.

In 2025, as AI ethicists invoke Shelley at Davos—warning of "prompt Prometheans" unleashing unparented code—her symbolism endures, a lens on biotech's blind spots.

Isolation isn't solitude; it's the silence before creation's scream.

Craving more gothic introspection? Dive into my review of Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater—another Romantic plunge into mind's murky depths. Read it here.

Frankenstein's Shadow in 2025: From Del Toro's Lens to Lab-Coated Nightmares

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein hit Netflix November 7th, a 2.5-hour fever dream starring Oscar Isaac's haunted Victor and Jacob Elordi's hulking, heart-wrenching Creature.

Del Toro, ever the cabinet-of-curiosities curator, amplifies Shelley's wet-dream visuals—cadaver-stuffed attics slick with alchemical glow,

Arctic gales whipping like Pan's Labyrinth's faun.

It's no reboot; it's resurrection, Isaac's Victor a jittery savant unraveling threads of sanity, Elordi's mute eloquence channeling the novel's tragic core.

Critics hail it 85% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, praising how it grafts modern body horror—think The Shape of Water's tender grotesques—onto Shelley's frame.

Beyond screens, Frankenstein's specter stalks real-world labs. "Frankenfoods"—that loaded tag for GMOs—resurfaced in October's agritech summit, where Monsanto heirs pitched drought-proof wheat amid farmer protests.

Echoing Victor's hubris, these bio-hacks promise climate salvation: rice sucking CO2 like a vacuum, salmon spliced for faster farms. Yet fears fester—unforeseen allergens, monocrop monopolies—mirroring the Creature's plea: what of the created's voice?

In UN climate huddles, ethicists again cite Shelley, urging "nurture clauses" in gene patents, lest we birth bounties that bite back.

This relevance?

It's visceral.

Frankenstein isn't antique; it's oracle.

The Prose That Bites—and Stumbles

Shelley's gothic prose?

A velvet garrote—lush, labyrinthine, alive with sensory deluge.

Sentences coil like Rhine mists: "The summer months passed away; and the hour of the wedding was fixed."

Deceptively simple, yet freighted with doom. Her ear for dialogue—Creature's baroque pleas—rivals

Coleridge's Rime, infusing eloquence into the abject.

Weaknesses?

Pacing drags for 2025 eyes, epistles piling like hoarfrost.

Modern readers, weaned on TikTok twists, may skim Walton's frame.

Still, it's no flaw—it's fidelity to Romantic reverie.

For enchanted woods that whisper warnings akin to Shelley's wilds, check my take on Dino Buzzati’s Il Segreto del Bosco Vecchio. Explore here.

Final Reckoning: Why Frankenstein Demands Your Shelf Space

Frankenstein scores 4/5—flawed genius that lingers like regret.

Read it before del Toro's echoes fade; it's not horror, but humanity's mirror.

What's your take—creator or created?

Drop below.

FAQ

Is Frankenstein public domain? 

Yes—since 1923 in the US, free for adaptations galore.

Why read Frankenstein today? 

Its biotech barbs cut 2025 headlines sharper than any sequel.

Best edition for beginners? 

Penguin Classics edition, annotated lightly.