The monsters we make

Thinking about two recent modern twists on "Frankenstein"

BOO! Welcome back to W.A.R. This is Issue 23 and was going to be a Halloween issue but I didn’t finish in time. If you enjoy this newsletter, please forward to your friends. If someone forwarded it to you, make sure you subscribe.

I’m in another stretch where I find myself reading four books at once. I’m halfway through Underworld by Don DeLillo, switching back and forth between the audiobook and the physical doorstop (800 pages, as excellent as everyone has always said, and my fifth DeLillo—I wrote about End Zone at The Paris Review years ago); halfway through The Thornbirds (700 pages, trashy and dated and I mostly hate it, but I’ve gone this far and now feel I must soldier on); I’ve just started Israel Is Real by my friend Rich Cohen (I’ve had my mom’s underlined copy for a decade and never read it, but now the time is right—urgent, actually—to self-educate on the topic); and in honor of Halloween I have the portable Poe on my nightstand. Lots of fun.

What are you reading? I like to hear about it.

Halloween gave me a good excuse to write about monsters.

After highlighting an excellent new horror novel last issue, my first time writing about horror, apparently I’m not done with the subject. Two recent novels I liked both adapt Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—though neither of them would fall under horror.

Quick digression: I considered making this a simple horror fiction rec issue but didn’t have enough to say about my favorite scary reads beyond recommending them; here in rapid succession are my picks if you want the creeping feeling I like and got from these: If You Could See Me Now, Peter Straub; Ill Will by Dan Chaon; Universal Harvester by John Darnielle; Horns by Joe Hill (Stephen King’s son); I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (the movie is also great, but the movie’s ending is completely different and watered-down); The Glass Kingdom by Lawrence Osborne; Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer; A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet; (those two are more like sci-fi horror); The Militia House by John Milas (brand new, just read, slow to start but then it gets gripping); and a special shout-out to It, a classic for good reason. I read it a few years back and was floored. The book is good, the movie adaptations are good, all of it.

Anyway: Frankenstein.

One of the most obnoxious things to say to someone when they reference “Frankenstein” and they mean the monster is “Frankenstein is the doctor, not the monster,” but to be fair, it’s an important distinction: Dr. Victor Frankenstein is the monster’s creator (and arguably the real monster). It’s also worth noting that Mary Shelley’s 1818 subtitle was “The Modern Prometheus,” a reference to the Greek god who shaped humans out of clay, then stole fire from Zeus and gave it back to mankind, and was punished for all eternity for it. (Hence the title of the J. Robert Oppenheimer biography that became the movie “Oppenheimer”: American Prometheus.) Nowadays, most editions of Frankenstein don’t even include Shelley’s subtitle on the cover, which surely loses part of her intent: reminding readers that Dr. Frankenstein was attempting to give something beautiful to the world, but instead created something terrible that appalled even him.

Frankenstein is surely one of the most adapted/retold/remixed works of fiction ever, along with Dracula (the book I most often think of when I think of Frankenstein; both are epistolary novels, and both feature one “monster” and one pursuer) and, off the top of my head, Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, Ulysses, Moby Dick, Alice in Wonderland, Emma, and Little Women? And stories from The Bible, obviously.

Shelley’s story continues to fascinate now as much as ever. The band The National’s newest album is called “First Two Pages of Frankenstein” and the band teased it last January with a video of frontman Matt Berninger reading Frankenstein at a piano.

Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013 in Arabic, translated in English 2018) takes the bones of Shelley’s story (sorry) and relocates them to Iraq during the U.S. invasion of Baghdad. Victor Frankenstein’s stand-in is Hadi the junk dealer, a “scruffy, unfriendly man in his fifties who always smelled of alcohol.”

The novel opens with an explosion. (And many, many explosions follow throughout, a commentary on life in a besieged city.) Hadi, we learn in disjointed order through his tall tales to local friends (many of whom know him as “Hadi the liar”), started finding and stitching together assorted body parts after his friend Nahem died in a prior car bombing and there was no body to identify. After this second explosion, Hadi at last finds a nose, which he had been waiting for, and goes home to sew it onto the large corpse he has sitting in his shed. All of this is told matter-of-factly, making it very wry.

He creates the corpse, which he calls Whatsitsname, with 'good intentions: to deliver an identifiable body to the forensics department so his friend can have a burial. But his friends are quick to push back on his self-proclaimed heroism:

“I wanted to hand him over to the forensics department, because it was a complete corpse that had been left in the streets like trash.”

“But it wasn’t a complete corpse. You made it complete,” someone objected.

“I made it complete so it wouldn’t be treated as trash, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a proper burial,” Hadi explained.

Walking along one day after completing the corpse, Hadi realizes he can’t exactly just drop it off at the morgue. “The only good solution was to go home, take the corpse apart, and restore it to what it had been—just disconnected body parts.” But when he arrives home, surprise: the body is gone.

There, I’ve given you the opening. A lot more happens, all of it pretty clever and crazy, yet written in a mostly serious tone (it somehow never feels slapstick): Hadi’s neighbor, an old woman named Elishva, thinks the corpse is her long-missing son Daniel and snuggles up with it (I kept thinking of the Jewish children’s book The Chanukkah Guest where Bubbe Bryna mistakes a bear for her rabbi and feeds him latkes); “Daniel” records an interview for a journalist; and the monster begins avenging the deaths of each prior owner of its body parts one by one, losing a body part every time he kills.

Through it all, Saadawi artfully makes Hadi himself a foil to his monster, especially after Hadi is injured in yet another bombing and walks away from the explosion disfigured and dragging one leg. The police investigating the murders become convinced Hadi himself is the monster of local lore.

The novel reads to me like “Young Frankenstein” crossed with American War. Lost body parts and social misunderstandings.

Worth a read if this all sounds fun to you.

Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019) is a very different take on Frankenstein—cornier, less clever, less exciting, and yet it has sort of stayed with me more than Frankenstein in Baghdad did.

Frankissstein starts in 1816, as Mary Shelley is writing her novel while on a very weird vacation with her husband the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (“Ozymandias”), his friend the poet Lord Byron, their friend the doctor John Polidori, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont. All of these people were real, of course; this was the setting in which Shelley came up with Frankenstein, though Winterson adds her own touches.

Then the novel brings us to modern times, where a transgender doctor, Ry Shelley, is following and admiring the career of the celebrated professor and A.I. researcher Victor Stein. (Get it? The parallel names are far from subtle.) We first meet Ry at a tech trade show where the cartoonish businessman Ron Lord is exhibiting his innovative new sex bots. It’s a hilarious scene, mostly thanks to Lord’s “step right up” crowd pumping. To give just one passage:

“I have based my franchise model on the rent-a-car business. Pick up in one city, drop off in another. And I’ve got five styles of XX-BOTs — including the Economy model here on the couch. She’s the cheapest.

She’s got nylon hair, so you do get a bit of static, and she whirrs a bit, but she’s a good, straightforward, no-frills, budget fuck…

And they all VI-BRATE! Any hole, any position. Vibrate!

Nice limb movement too. You can position her how you want. All the girls have an extra-wide splayed-leg position. It’s popular with our clients, especially the fat ones.”

Dr. Stein, meanwhile, is running sinister experiments in a series of underground tunnels. But before we can find out what he’s messing with, he and Ry have a lot of hot sex and conversations about how Stein feels about being with a trans person and how Ry feels about their physical body.

The book toggles back and forth between the real Shelley in 1816 and the current day characters, but the flashbacks to Shelley’s time don’t add much to the novel beyond showing that Shelley was pondering many of the same questions, 200 years earlier, as Ry, Victor, and Ron Lord debate in the present (automation, personhood, human agency, mortality).

Frankissstein for me was one of those books you don’t feel impressed by while reading (so cheesy sometimes, so many cartoonish speeches, so many digressions!), but then you’ve whipped through it and find that you keep thinking about it long after.

Is the “villain” Ron Lord with his femme bot business, or Dr. Stein with his attempts at creating “post-humans?” Stein wants to take humans beyond A.I., and defends himself to Ron thusly: “Bots are our slaves; house slaves, work slaves, sex slaves. The question is us. What shall we do with ourselves? In fact we have answered that question already. Enhancement, including DNA intervention… The real question, though, is that however we enhance our biology we are still inside a body. To be free from the body completes the human dream.” Sounds like Elon Musk. (The novel’s questions about A.I. and automation, by the way, make it even more timely right now than when it came out in 2019.)

Saadawi’s Hadi and Winterson’s Victor Stein belong with Dr. Moreau, Henry Jekyll, Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, and other great mad sickos in fiction. But these two modern twists on Frankenstein also add something I don’t recall much of in Shelley’s original: black comedy.

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