Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief, Knox the boy who buys the beef

At this year’s Readercon, the Memorial Guest of Honor is the amazing Mary Shelley—author of Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, daughter of noted freethinker William Godwin and the awesome early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, wife of famed Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and apparently half-auntie to at least one illegitimate child of Lord Byron, although probably so was everyone.

I’ve already read Frankenstein on multiple occasions (and written a number of papers on GOD VICTOR YOU’RE SUCH AN IDIOT), read Daisy Hay’s biography of her and her whole clique, Young Romantics, and read this Kate Beaton comic:


So it was a bit of a challenge to seek out NEW things to read about Mary Shelley in order to prepare for the convention.

Enter stage right, The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece by Roseanne Montillo, shelved unassumingly on the bargain nonfiction table at Brookline Booksmith, waiting for a morbid nerd such as myself to stumble upon it so it could tempt us out of our book-buying hiatus. (I bought three other nonfiction books about dead people that day, too. Le sigh.) I started reading the book in the middle of a thunderstorm because that is clearly the only way to do the thing properly.

The book itself is a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster of research, being about numerous distinctly different things, although they all do relate back to Frankenstein sooner or later. All the things are pretty interesting, though. A big chunk of it is biography of Mary Shelley and her whole nutty Romantic set, including her half-sister Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron, Dr. Polidori, some English dude who was really into boats, and some other friend that Percy Shelley was trying to get Mary to sleep with so he could feel less bad about the fact that he was banging Claire Clairmont. Guys, these people might have been literary geniuses but they were so fucked up.

Other sections of the book, which I was less familiar with going into, include: the history and habitat of the actual Frankenstein family in Germany. I HAD NO IDEA THERE WAS AN ACTUAL FRANKENSTEIN FAMILY. I wonder if they still exist or if they’ve changed their name (or are all like “FRANKEN-SHTEEN!” about it). There is a bunch of stuff about body-snatching and resurrection men, the murder aspects of which I was fairly familiar with (although I did learn a new nursery rhyme about Burke and Hare!). There is also a hell of a lot more stuff than I’d ever heard before about the actual SCIENCE that all this grave-robbing, body-snatching, and prostitute-murdering was in service of, although if you want some quick funny treatments of the subjects I recommend the Sawbones podcast episodes on “Reanimation” and “Corpse Theft and the Resurrection Men.” We meet such infamous Italians as Luigi Galvani, from whom we get the word “galvanism” (which used to refer specifically to the science of using electricity to make dead things twitch, which was SUPER FUNNY the one or two times the book also used it in its modern sense of “motivated”); his nephew Giovanni Aldini, who did further experiments in galvanism in England, Alessandro Volta, who invented the voltaic battery and did some impressive debunking of galvanist theory; and Humphry Davy, who was high on nitrous oxide. We also travel back in time a bit and meet several interesting alchemists, who are what we had before they got their process down enough to be scientists.

My biggest gripe with this book is that it’s rather poorly edited. The subjects jump around a lot, which would be OK on its own, probably. But there are weird issues with the line editing and confusing word choices, and there are some small bits (a paragraph here, a tangent there) that could really have been scrapped or severely condensed (we don’t need a two-page recap of the plot of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; might as well just go reread the poem). Whoever wrote the captions to the (totally awesome) images appeared to have just dashed them out without proofreading them or deciding if they needed to be in sentence form or not. This bums me out, because the book is well-researched and about awesome things and essentially well-written.

In which I learn the reason I hated nearly everyone as a teen was because they were all werewolves

Because for some inexplicable reason I decided I wasn’t in enough book clubs, I decided to join in on the July book for the Parasol Protectorate book club over at Gail Carriger’s blog. I missed the June book due to library slowness, but this month we’re reading a nineties YA classic, Blood and Chocolate, and the library had enough copies for me to get my hands on it.

Blood and Chocolate is possibly the original horny teenage werewolf story, or very close to it. It isn’t nearly as bad as that description makes it sound, though. For one, the protagonist is herself already a werewolf, rather than a dippy lovestruck human waiting for big werewolf man to save her from the boringness of humanity. There is a dippy lovestruck human waiting for magic to save him, but he is a dude and he also reacts really badly to magic when it happens because he is, at the end of the day, pretty much just a regular person.

The main things that struck me while I was reading this book were (a) I’m actually enjoying this book and (b) I am entirely certain that if I’d read this book when I was actually a teenager, or anywhere near the stage of life this book is purporting to portray, I would have hated it as I have hated few things in this world. EVERYBODY IS HORNY. ALL THE TIME. Not just the werewolves, although the werewolves are certainly like Distilled Essence of One-Track-Mindedness, but also the humans, who, apart from one brief interlude where Bingo and Jem are friends and watch a movie, are just teeth-hurtingly perfect descriptions of exactly the kind of “alternative” teens who think that dressing their one and only interest in life up in different clothes than the jocks do somehow counts as having niche interests or otherwise being different. I attracted a lot of those dudes throughout high school and college and being reminded that they exist still makes me seethe with rage. (Nothing like having your supposedly fellow “different people” insisting that you cannot POSSIBLY be ACTUALLY interested in all the stuff that we supposedly have in common, like they’re all super ~artsy!~ and shit right up until the point where you want to keep talking about art and then they’re all baffled because they’ve never heard of anything so ridiculous as someone actually liking art to the point where they want to talk about it, to make you feel alienated and lied to. Actually, fuck “feeling” lied to. I got lied to, a lot.)  Aidan Teague talks big about how he wants art and magic and possibility, but all he actually wants is a girlfriend and to get laid. Vivian talks about respecting humans and feeling out of place in her pack, but she pretty much just wants to get laid, too. Not a single soul in the book appears to spend even half a second contemplating ideas like “Not ready” or “Not old enough,” which makes both the human and werewolf characters completely alien to me, particularly as teenagers, although I suppose it’s a fairly accurate portrayal of quite a lot of teenagers since I definitely recall those people being around. But at the time I only knew who those people were if they were being assholes to me about it, so it’s interesting for me now, as a twenty-six-year-old, whose social circle is largely made up of people I didn’t go to high school with, to read a story about… well, really, to teen me it would have been a story about those people, with all the Othering and judgementalness that that phrase implies. I don’t know if I could have even finished reading this book if I didn’t have a literature degree, with all the expensive years of work in learning to stretch my empathy and get into the heads of characters that aren’t like me. It was still hard, sometimes, for me to suspend my disbelief enough to engage with the characters, even though I know intellectually that all the stuff that’s hardest for me to believe was actually the nonfantasy element. (I get the feeling that the author was probably one of Those People as a teenager, because, while I may have difficulty relating to hypersexuals and not be able to really grok them, I am unable to avoid realizing they exist; however, one of the hallmarks of Those People is that they are 110% convinced everyone is just like them. Since ever y single character in this book is horny as shit all the time, I’m guessing that that’s how Klaus thinks everybody is.) (Oh god, my asexual elitism is coming back and I’m not even fully asexual anymore.)

Stuff I had no problem reading or believing: Lots of fairly intense violence. Complicated werewolf mythology and even more complicated werewolf pack politics. Murder and mayhem and people dying in fires. I really could have done with probably half as much horniness and twice as much everything else, because the everything else is exactly what I want out of urban fantasy novels.

Stuff that was creepy: The story ends with Vivian ending up with the creepy werewolf dude who’d been previously dating her mom, accepting that she can’t get involved with humans because she’s part of an incestuous little species of nasty, domineering assholes. On the one hand, it fits, because Vivian really is a nasty domineering asshole. On the other hand, it’s hard to root for “nasty domineering asshole finds self-actualization by being nastily dominated by another nastily domineering asshole” as a romance. On the third hand, not all books have to be about people you actually like. Sometimes it’s enlightening to read stories about unfathomable aliens and try to grok how in the world anyone could actually think like that. This is also why I read a lot about serial killers, although a lot of serial killers have more comprehensible-to-me thought processes than Vivian. (Except for the bit where Vivian’s inner monologue has lines that are exactly out of Eliot Rodgers’ manifesto, but the less said about that the better. At least the book came first.) I hate to write a protagonist off as an unlikeable bitch, because YA heroines are routinely derided as unlikeable bitches if they have any personality at all (and as boring Mary Sues if they don’t), but really, this book is only enjoyable if you give up the idea that Vivian is a heroine of any sort—she is an antihero at best. She’s not as bad as the other werewolves, because the other werewolves are basically all tantrum-throwing abusive serial killer child molester stalkers, but she’s jealous, self-absorbed, misogynistic, reckless, game-playing, one-track-minded, smug, rude, mean, and frequently really stupid. She’s confident in her looks, which would be great if she weren’t also incomprehensibly stupid about the limits of physical beauty’s ability to carry the entirety of a relationship. (This seems to be a stupidity shared by the rest of the werewolves, so maybe it’s not entirely her fault?)

This seems to be one of those books that was engaging enough that I liked it while I was reading it, but the more I think about it the more I actually have major, major complaints about basically everything, so perhaps I should stop reviewing it before I completely kill off any fun I had reading it.