Still one of the most intelligent and unsettling novels ever written about creation, responsibility, and revenge, Frankenstein is far stranger than its afterlife in popular culture.

Shelley’s monster is not a lumbering prop but a thinking, eloquent being, and the real horror lies less in animation than in abandonment: what happens when a maker refuses any duty to what he has made.

Written out of Gothic materials but sharpened by philosophical force, the novel cuts into ambition, loneliness, scientific arrogance, and the fantasy that invention can be separated from consequence. It remains one of those rare canonical books that actually earns the adjective modern.

1992 Penguin Classics paperback, edited and introduced by Maurice Hindle. Standard scholarly reading edition, great condition.