Somewhere around the ninth-grade, I picked up Mary Shelly's book 'Frankenstein'. After finishing it....I sat for about a week...off and on, thinking over the writing, the story, the good doctor's efforts, and the conclusion.
There's one single bit over the book and Shelly, that I didn't realize until the 1990s when reading through an article. The book goes back to 1818. A British gal....Shelly, then roughly 21 years....had a 'contest' brewing between her boyfriend (Shelley), and his buddy (Lord Byron).
The 'contest'? Who could write the better horror story? During the contest period, she was traveling through Germany, and was in the region of the Odenwald Forest, near Darmstadt. Something 'clicked'.
Amusingly enough....no one rarely mentions the two guys in this contest or what they wrote as a 'horror' story. What Lord Byron attempted to write, was 'Fragment of a Novel', which was supposed to be a vampire story....but the manuscript was never finished. As for Percy Shelly? He made an effort but never got anywhere on the story business (remember, he was a poet at heart).
What can be said about the German landscape and Darmstadt? This was the period where the Brothers Grimm were busy, and there were literally millions of tales or home-spun stories which were being told at pubs and homes. Some were about enchanted women....some about demons....some about magical unicorns, and some related to crazed beasts.
It was an era where travel was going on....a lot more people were engaged in idle chatter in roadside inns in the evening hours, and they were sharing stories they'd heard weeks or months prior. Yes of course....a bit of booze probably helped to relax the mind, and the story being told was probably more 'gripping'.
The end result with 'Frankenstein'? No matter how good the doctor's intent was....what emerged was some creature that could not be controlled or guided. From the moment of creation....the creature was absolutely a threat. Consequences? You could write an entire book over this story, and the consequences that were laid out.
It's an odd challenge that was laid out, and you to wonder.....why get into a competition about scary horror things? Why not write a romance piece, or some unsolvable murder? So this is the consequence of that one single evening....the challenge over a year to lead onto the creation of 'Frankenstein'.
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