Title: I Am Frankenstein
Author: C. Dean Andersson
Date of First Publication: 1996
Place of Publication: Zebra
Type: Novel
Characters: Victor Frankenstein; The Creature; Mary Shelley
Themes: SYMPATHETIC MONSTER; MAD SCIENTIST/MONSTER; BYRONIC HERO
Critical Summary: Mary Shelley’s classic characters come alive in this vivid reimagining of the landmark novel. Now that they both have the reader’s undivided attention, both Frankenstein and his Creature would like to tell the real versions of their stories. Both are charming and engaging narrators, equally unreliable and very eager to set the record straight about the various “fabrications” found in Mary Shelley’s original tale. For starters, Frankenstein’s name was actually Gunther, and he was never actually a doctor at all. In fact, it was only after witnessing his first terrible thunderstorm that young Gunther became fascinated in science. After years of cruel and fruitless experimentation, Gunther’s life changes forever upon meeting a young woman from the future named Katiasa who longs to provide him with the final key to mastering the secrets of life and death.
As Gunther’s experiments become increasingly successful and he discovers the side effect of immortality, he begins to wonder about Katiasa’s origins and motivations, leading him to uncover her truth. She is merely a pawn of an advanced alien race hoping to use Frankenstein as a tool for some kind of mysterious resurrection. Torn between common sense and his infamous intellectual curiosity, Frankenstein is lead to give life to his first human creation, which Katiasa names Anton Gorobec Frankenstein. Unfortunately, all bodies require a soul, and although Gunther has been able to craft a body, the recycled soul happens to belong to a long dead Viking lord that isn’t too happy about being so thoughtlessly resurrected.
Wonderfully written and gloriously campy, C. Dean Andersson crafts a delightful piece of 90’s pulp fiction that expands on the original novel’s most important characters while still maintaining an impressive degree of creative freedom. Instead of portraying the Creature as a villain like in Shelley’s novel, he is given an actual name and an entire backstory of his soul’s previous life. Frankenstein on the other hand is portrayed as a borderline sociopath, unable to conjure any sense of pity for the living things on which he carelessly experiments.
However, I Am Frankenstein definitely eschews many of the more thought-provoking aspects of Shelley’s original novel and replaces them with humorous pop-culture references and buckets of blood, causing the novel to end up resembling an 80’s Science/Horror/Fantasy B-movie more than it does a classic work of English Science Fiction. In conclusion, this is certainly not the Frankenstein story that has become an influential, cultural phenomenon across the world, but is a highly entertaining spin-off that will delight all curious fans of horror, fantasy and science fiction alike.
Administrative Notes: Nick Terheggen, CSUF; Alexandra Roman CSUF (editing)