If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear. For centuries, the story of Victor Frankenstein and the monster he created has held readers spellbound.

On the surface, it is a novel of tense and steadily mounting dread.

On a more profound level, it illuminates the triumph and tragedy of the human condition in its portrayal of a scientist who oversteps the bounds of conscience, and of a creature tortured by the solitude of a world in which he does not belong.

A novel of almost hallucinatory intensity, Mary Shelley s Frankenstein represents one of the most striking flowerings of the Romantic imagination.