Title: Prodigal Son (first in Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein series)

Author: Dean Koontz and Kevin J. Anderson

Date of First Publication: 2005

Place of Publication: Bantam Books

Type: Novel

Characters: The Creature; Victor Frankenstein

Themes: MAD SCIENTIST/MONSTER; SYMPATHETIC MONSTER; POSTHUMAN; BYRONIC HERO; ANDROID

Critical Summary: Carson O’Connor and her partner, Michael Maddison, detectives in New Orleans, come across a strange series of murders and find they are hunting a serial killer. The killer has been dubbed “The Surgeon” for the way he cuts away part of the body. Meanwhile, Deucalion, a monk of huge stature and mysterious background who resides in the Rombuk Monastery in Tibet, receives a letter and a newspaper clipping from an old friend. Deucalion, we discover, is Victor Frankenstein’s Creature, and this news leads him to believe that his creator has returned. As he ventures to New Orleans in search of answers, he begins to fear a coming apocalypse at the hands of a mad scientist who has lived far too long for his own good.

Frankenstein, it turns out, is working to create what he calls a “New Race,” composed of android-like beings who are stronger, faster, and smarter than the average human. Set two hundred years after the events of Mary Shelley’s novel, Prodigal Son imagines a radically different trajectory for Victor: rather than coming to regret his experiments, what if he grows even more ambitious? And what if he lives long enough to pursue that ambition with twenty-first-century science? Koontz and Anderson force the audience to confront who is the real monster in Prodigal Son of which there is no doubt it is Victor, unlike in Shelley’s more subtle approach in the original work, which some doubt could exist if one existed at all.

Administrative Notes: Michael Quach, CSUF; Alex Goodman, CSUF (editing); Sam Drake, CSUF (editing)