Frankenstein

He is Victor Frankenstein, a young Genevese whose study of natural philosophy at Ingolstadt hardens into obsession. He discovers the secret of animating lifeless matter, and in months of secret labor he builds a living being from the leavings of charnel-houses and dissecting rooms. On a dreary November night the dull yellow eye opens. Overcome with horror at what he has made, Victor flees his own creation.

And then the creature speaks too. Cast out, hunted, learning language and grief by watching a poor family through a chink in a cottage wall, he comes to understand exactly what he is and what he was denied. "I ought to be thy Adam," he tells his maker, "but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed." His demand of Victor is simple and terrible, and the debate between them turns on love, loneliness, and who owes what to whom.

Mary Shelley wrote a Gothic tale that reads at every turn as a moral one, set against lightning storms over Lake Geneva, the glaciers of Chamonix, and the endless white of the pole. Underneath the horror and the sublime, a question that never quite settles: which of these two, the maker or the made, is the monster.