The complete, uncut text of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, annotated by someone who has questions.

Ellis Keen’s commentary runs throughout the novel, letter by letter and chapter by chapter, like a smart friend reading over your shoulder who worked out early that the title character is not the one with the bolts in his neck.

Mary Shelley was eighteen. She started the book to win a ghost story contest during a sunless summer on Lake Geneva, and what she finished was a new genre and a question that has not gone away since: what do you owe the thing you make?

Victor Frankenstein builds a living creature out of parts and secrecy and everything he has. Then it opens its eyes, and he leaves the room. The rest of the book is consequence.

This edition contains:

• The case that the monster of the title is the man who ran

• A creature who teaches himself to read, to reason, and to argue, and who turns out to be the most careful speaker in the book

• A narrator inside a narrator inside a narrator, and what Shelley is doing by burying the creature that deep

• Two centuries of retellings that handed us a grunting green villain, painted over the articulate one Shelley actually wrote

• The 1831 introduction, written thirteen years and a third edition later, where Shelley tells the story of that summer herself

Ambition, abandonment, and the difference between making something and raising it. She had all three worked out before she turned twenty.

Questionable Classics. The books you were assigned. The commentary you deserved. Next up: Hamlet* and Pride and Prejudice*.