Creatures

I'm on a Frankenstein binge, so when I found this book existed, and was only ninety-nine cents, I gave it a read. Creatures, edited by David Thomas Moore, is five stories that pay homage to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. As usual with anthologies like this, some stories are better than others, but I found them all worth reading.

The stories are presented in chronological order, ranging from the mid-19th century to the present day. None of them knocked me over, but I found the second story, "The New Woman," by Rose Biggin, to be the most ambitious. Set in 1899, it has two women scientists create resurrect a dead woman, making her an object of art. A cameo by Shelley's Frankenstein, sensing another like him, seems out of place and could have been cut.

The first story is "Kaseem's Way," by Tade Thompson, set in the 1840s. Kaseem is a London street urchin who is taken in by a doctor and mentored by him. He begins experiments in Newgate prison, digging up the executed and making himself a human. In first person, Shelley's Frankenstein hunts down the new creation, as again, he senses there is another like him.

"Reculver," by Paul Meloy, set in Britain during World War II, is the memory of a boy who likes to explore a town that has been evacuated. He has a crush on a beautiful girl, but she goes missing, just after her boyfriend is found murdered. The boy will also see a creature, whom he describes as "the creature of my dreams, I had no doubt. It was Guilt incarnate, something formed of matter from the shame of my preoccupations." In this story the creature is a metaphor, but perhaps he always is, just a different metaphor.

Emma Newman is the author of "Made Monstrous," which is a mystery story about body parts going missing. A world-weary detective and his eager assistant begin to piece together (no pun intended) just who is swiping these body parts and why. I don't want to spoil the ending, but it turns out that all the men who have "donated" parts are monsters in their own right.

The last story is odd, because it is very ambitious in plot but strangely written. The author is Kaaron Warren, and her style is at times confusing, at other times just seeming like bad writing. Her transitions are awkward, and at times the thread of the plot is either dropped or repeated. In any event, the idea is terrific--a cruise ship, never docking, hosts people who are either in need of a body part or wanting to get rid of one (I have heard of people who irrationally want to have limbs amputated). The story also leaves a mystery--the narrator, who is married to a man who loses his arm in a construction accident, frequently refers to herself as deformed in some way, but we never know how.

Frankenstein means many things to many people, as this collection shows. It's a must for the enthusiast, but for those who care not a whit about the original novel it might prove tedious.