Frankenstein DECODED - Mary Shelley

The complete, unabridged novel — with the guidance built in.

Every word Shelley wrote, plus a friendly walk-through before and after each chapter: what to watch for going in, and what it all meant coming out. No summaries. No spoilers. Not a substitute for reading the book — the tool that finally makes reading it work.

This book is over 200 years old but basically invented science fiction, and a teenager wrote it. Mary Shelley was eighteen when she started Frankenstein, dreamed up on a rainy summer in 1816 when she and a group of friends dared each other to write ghost stories. Almost everything you think you know about it is probably wrong: the monster has no bolts in his neck, nobody yells "It's alive!" the way the movies do, and the word "Frankenstein" is the name of the man who builds the creature, not the creature himself. What Shelley actually wrote is stranger and sadder than any movie: a story about a brilliant young man who gets exactly what he wants, and about what he owes to the thing he makes.