Since every student who ever encountered Frankenstein gets told that it's a metaphor of bad, absent parenting, this novella can't claim any credit for that - for all it's called out as a great overlooked truth. But the book is still an interesting confrontation to the monsters we create - and our responsibility for them, even when they move beyond our control. ( )

I AM SHOOK.

About two pages into this book, I came across a quote that I wanted to leave in my review and put a post-it on the page; about five pages later, I put another post-it. This kept happening and now my book is full of bright orange post-it notes of wonderful quotes and I want to use them all. But alas, I'd probably end up quoting the whole bloody book.

But this is definitely one of my favourites:

Yet every writer worth a good-god damn knows this too, for it is graven into each of us: no one cares for beauty. Not in fiction. Not on its own, not pure, untroubled beauty; not in fiction. It’s what we crave in the real world, of course; beauty, and you know I mean that in its broadest sense: the sense of kindness and wisdom and peace and joy: all the things in the world that are beautiful, and all the things we crave in real life, but which are not sufficient to count, on their own, for anything in the world of stories.

There are so many fantastic questions and curiosities in this book. It's also eerie and Gothic and beautiful. It's got ATMOSPHERE. And the author's unending quarrel with himself over hating Frankenstein is in equal parts funny, interesting and thought-provoking.

Almost everyone has an inborn need to create; in most people this is thwarted and forgotten, and the drive is pushed into other actives that are less threatening, less difficult, and less rewarding. In some people, the need to create is transmuted into the need to destroy.

I actually had no idea what this book was going to be about and I feel like that almost made it better. I didn't see any of the twists and was just along for the ride and totally loved it. There are so many gorgeous paragraphs and I read the whole thing in an afternoon. It full on distracted me from my Buffy rewatch, so you know it's gotta be good.

I 100% recommend this to everyone. ( )