This was a really good take on the Frankenstein Monster right up until the last few pages when it just went bizarre. I was intrigued by the thought of having the monsters side of the story told in his own words and while that was the case the ending just came out of nowhere and really let the rest of the story down. It was cheesy and felt like Saberhagen had no clue as to how to end the story. Great idea. Crappy conclusion. ( )

In this novel Frankenstein’s creature narrates his own story through a personal journal. Victor Frankenstein becomes involved with a rich man named Saville who sees Victor’s experiments as a way to create slaves. The being Victor pieced together is extremely intelligent and discovers Saville’s plan. He soon realizes that Saville has hired an assassin to murder women to provide Frankenstein with fresh material. The creature flees from his creator and his evil cohorts and starts a journey to meet Benjamin Franklin who is in Paris. This simulation of life believes that Franklin is the only one who understands experiments with electricity and that he holds the key to discovering who he really is.

Franklin is interested in Victor’s experiments. His illegitimate son, Freeman, writes to him about a new book that has just been published called “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.” Freeman starts to debunk the book by traveling to Ingolstadt and Geneve to visit the places mentioned in the novel.

This book doesn’t become interesting until three-fourths of the way through when the creature and Freemen meet. Before that point, the narrative is boring and my mind strayed a lot. I started to think that the book would have an interesting ending, but then I was completely disappointed. The twist ending is out-of-joint with the rest of the book and the last chapter felt stuck-on. ( )

This was another good book by Saberhagen. Although I haven’t read Frankenstein, I understand that this book is very much in the same spirit. The story is that of Frankenstein’s monster, from his own point of view. He tells a story different from the book that was published about him, how he (the “monster”) was misrepresented. The story certainly has a very unexpected twist at the end, although I should have expected something like this from Saberhagen, I totally did not see it coming. ( )

This is a great book, an alternate version of the Frankenstein story. ( )

Publishers Weekly Review: This novel picks up where Mary Shelley's classic tale left off, continuing the narrative from the monster's point of view. Through flashbacks in the monster's journal, Saberhagen also rescrambles the original story in such a way that the monster is absolved of the murders of Victor Frankenstein's brother William and fiancee Elizabeth. The monster sets off on a quest for his own identity that takes him from the Arctic and his first sexual experience with an "Esquimeaux" to a meeting in Paris with Ben Franklin, whose experiments with electricity led Frankenstein to attempt the monster's initial animation. Throughout, the irrationality of the monster's sheer existence is set against the values and science of Enlightenment Europe. In the tour-de-force ending, rationality triumphs by means of a neat science-fiction twist. February ( )