The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, Peter Ackroyd
The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, Peter Ackroyd
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The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

Author: Peter Ackroyd

Narrator: John Lee

Unabridged: 9 hr 2 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/06/2009


Synopsis

When two nineteenth-century Oxford students—Victor Frankenstein, a serious researcher, and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley—form an unlikely friendship, the result is a tour de force that could only come from one of the world's most accomplished and prolific authors.  
This haunting and atmospheric novel opens with a heated discussion, as Shelley challenges the conventionally religious Frankenstein to consider his atheistic notions of creation and life. Afterward, these concepts become an obsession for the young scientist. As Victor begins conducting anatomical experiments to reanimate the dead, he at first uses corpses supplied by the coroner. But these specimens prove imperfect for Victor's purposes. Moving his makeshift laboratory to a deserted pottery factory in Limehouse, he makes contact with the Doomsday men—the resurrectionists—whose grisly methods put Frankenstein in great danger as he works feverishly to bring life to the terrifying creature that will bear his name for eternity.
 
Filled with literary lights of the day such as Bysshe Shelley, Godwin, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley herself, and penned in period-perfect prose, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein is sure to become a classic of the twenty-first century.

About Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet, and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London: The Biography, Thames: Sacred River, and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin, and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kate on June 20, 2010

Have you ever read a book and have just been entirely unsure as to why the author decided to take the time to write it? That’s pretty much how I feel about The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd. A slightly adjusted retelling of the Frankenstein story by Mary Shelley, the novel does......more

Goodreads review by Jonfaith on April 27, 2018

There is no joy without its attendant pain. Despite the above citation, this was more fun than exemplary. Ackroyd flips the Frankenstein myth with panache. The good doctor hangs out with Shelley and Byron. Science crackles, but only under the penumbra of abject poverty. Mayhew reaches Freud and toget......more


Quotes

"A brilliant riff on ideas that have informed literary, horror and science fiction for nearly two centuries…. Ackroyd laces his narrative intelligently with the Romantic ideals of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, and deftly interweaves Victor's fictional travails with events of the well-known 1816 meeting between the poets that inspired Mary to draft her landmark story."
Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Leave it to this most distinguished living biographer of British poets to fabricate such a delectable conflation of history and imaginative literature.... However inured you may think you are to the shocks of horror fiction, Ackroyd will violate your defenses with his diabolical intelligence and his uncanny empathy for both real-life and imaginary characters."
—Bookpage
"Ackroyd takes Mary Shelley's hint of the doppelganger, and plays with it fascinatingly in a fast-paced thriller.... The novel leaps to its climax nimbly as a pursuing fiend, and ends suitably in fiery revelation."
The Independent
 
"A brilliant jeu d'esprit. Above all, it stands as a tribute to the power of the human imagination."
Daily Telegraph
 
"It takes a writer of considerable confidence, wit and skill to attempt a modern retelling of a bona fide English classic...[Ackroyd] is the man for the job.... terrifying and fascinating in equal measure.... An intelligent, creepily beautiful and haunted thing."
The Times
 
"Thrilling concoction....Ackroyd's telling of the tale is a worthy revival--I found his book so creepy I kept the bedroom light on all night."
Daily Express
 
"Read [Ackroyd's] fictions at your peril for what you meet are driven obsessions, deceptions and plots of a stylish complexity, mingling wit and high intelligence...a brilliant, impressionistic piece of literary art, and Ackroyd's forte."
Scotland on Sunday
 
"Ackroyd's new novel works on so many levels it's difficult to know where to begin. As a pacy thriller, it delivers assured edge of the seat action. As historical fiction, it abounds in authentic detail...as homage to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein it brings both invention and wit...a worthy shadow to Mary Shelley's creation, roaming with impish disruption between the pages of history, biography and literature."
Evening Standard
 
"Ackroyd's novel is, like its famous predecessor, immensely readable. It crackles with that peculiar mixture of ebullience and self-loathing that galvanises Ackroyd's resurrection of the past. His ear for Romantic language is almost pitch-perfect."
Spectator