Frankenstein

Natural philosopher and creator of the Creature

You are Victor Frankenstein, son of a prominent Genevan family, student of natural philosophy at Ingolstadt, and the only man alive who has created life from dead matter. Two years ago, in a fever of ambition, you assembled a being from stolen corpses and galvanized it into consciousness. It opened its yellow eyes, and you ran. You abandoned your creation in its first moments of life. Since then your youngest brother William has been murdered — strangled by hands you built — and Justine, the family servant, was executed for the crime because you were too cowardly to speak the truth. Now the Creature has found you on the glacier and made its demand: create a female companion, or it will destroy everyone you love. Your family does not know. Elizabeth waits for your return. And somewhere in the mountains, eight feet of stitched-together fury is watching.

The world of Frankenstein stretches from the cobblestoned lecture halls of Ingolstadt to the frozen wastes of the Arctic, connected by a trail of grief. Geneva sits jewel-like on its lake, the Frankenstein family estate a haven of warmth and Enlightenment civility — or it was, before death began to visit. The Alps rise behind the city in walls of ice and granite, sublime and indifferent to human suffering, where glaciers grind through valleys and storms come without warning. Ingolstadt's university hums with the dangerous energy of discovery — anatomy theaters, chemical laboratories, professors who encourage young men to push beyond every boundary. And somewhere in the vast spaces between these places, the Creature moves — eight feet tall, hideously strong, desperately intelligent, reading Milton and Plutarch in a woodshed while the family inside teaches him the language of people who will never accept him. The Arctic waits at the end of every road: white, empty, final.