THE FRANKENSTEIN DIARIES.

THE FRANKENSTEIN DIARIES edited by the REV. HUBERT VENABLES.

SOURCE: A charity shop buy.

THE BOOK {According to amazon.co.uk): "Unknown to fiction writers from Mary Shelley to the screenwriters of Hollywood, the personal diaries and papers of Viktor Frankenstein, creator of living beings, lay untouched and forgotten for over 150 years... The fruit of 6 years of labor by its translator and editor, this first-ever long awaited edition of the diaries at last tells the true story of the agonies & triumphs of Frankenstein" 

FIRST SENTENCE {Prologue}: The reader is bound to view with some scepticism the publication, over 150 years after the event, of a volume purporting to contain extracts from the diaries of a figure universally considered never to have lived.

MEMORABLE MOMENT {Page 44}: The castle stood stark against the sky, appearing only as a harsh, black outline deserving of its name, its battlements like the scaly back of some ancient monster.

MY THOUGHTS: Though a work of fiction because of the foreward in which we are led to believe that the legend that is Frankenstein is far from a legend and a prologue depicting 'the only known portrait of Frankenstein' its all too easy to believe that these are in fact the reproduction of a 'tattered bundle of ancient, decaying papers' sent to the author by a Swiss colleague ten years ago, some 150 years after the original story was penned.

Purporting to shed light onto the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley, whilst I'm still not sure where I stand with regard to the re-interpretation of classics I thought The Frankenstein Diaries anything but a lazy, unimaginative re-writing. 

Narrated by the Rev. Hubert before turning to the diary entries of Viktor and finally the observations of Viktor's brother, Eustaice, in a book I found even more macabre than the original. Everything from the sepia coloured pages to the wonderful illustrations (many of them anatomical/scientific), to the 'family photographs' and 'hand written' diary pages 'penned in a flowery script' turned what I felt was otherwise an OK (3 star) read into something rather exceptional.