3. The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein

By Kiersten White

A few Goodread reviews mentioned how it was recommended to have some knowledge of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein (2018) has many nods to the original source material. Here's one review: 

“The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein is, essentially, a retelling of Frankenstein from the perspective of Elizabeth - an orphan taken in by the Frankenstein family and later the fiancée of Victor. I think this book will work much better for those familiar with the original as it gives a lot of nods to the story. It's hard to appreciate some of the clever twists the author takes without knowing what it's based on.

 

Through her eyes, the tortured genius of Victor becomes a sometimes frightening thing, and yet nothing is as terrifying as being a woman in 18th Century Europe. The stifling constraints placed on women and their ambitions are palpable as the story unfolds. It was so easy for a woman to be dismissed as whiny or silly, or worse-- mad.

When Victor goes missing in Ingolstadt and writes no letters, Elizabeth begins to track him down. Her investigation leads her down dark paths to charnel houses and secret laboratories. What has Victor been up to? Knowing the truth didn't take anything away from reading. In fact, it made those mysterious dark shadows all the creepier.

This story largely fills in gaps in the original tale, while shedding a completely new light on it. It's smart how Kiersten White has managed to keep a lot the same, while also creating a bigger and very different-looking picture.

The original Frankenstein calls into question what it really means to be a monster and, indeed, who the real monsters are. I think White might have answered that question.”

 

I had read Shelley’s Frankenstein when I was in my late teens/early twenties, and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to revisit the classic 1818 novel, so like the lazy, yet resourcefully efficient, reader that I am, I borrowed the graphic novel version to quicky refresh my memory instead! 

 

According to Wikipedia, Elizabeth Lavenza and Victor Frankenstein were first cousins in the original edition.  In the revised third edition (1831), Elizabeth was a non-relation adopted by the Frankenstein family.  According to the graphic novel, Elizabeth was portrayed as a saint, a self-sacrificing two-dimensional young woman who was loved by the Frankenstein family.  In The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein, she is naturally given much more depth as the Frankenstein narrative is retold entirely from her perspective, and there is a LOT more going on behind her innocent façade.  In fact, she’s a calculating survivor who’s determined to marry Victor, not because of love, but because it was her best option as an orphaned young woman in the 19^th century.

 

I’m going to rely on another Goodreads review to summarize how I felt, as it really does save me a lot of time, and time is precious right now!

“I do not think I expected one of the best books I read this year to be a retelling of Frankenstein where it’s not just about the nature of monstrousness, but about the power of women working together and escaping an abusive relationship, with intoxicating writing and a morally grey lady as the protagonist.

 

I absolutely loved the way Kiersten White wrote the abusive relationship at the heart of this - we see the fucked-up nature of that relationship long before Elizabeth does, but it never feels as if Elizabeth “should’ve known better.” In every moment, she has full audience sympathy - in every moment, even if I hated her actions, I understood her. The narrative puts you so far into her mind that it is impossible to look away and it is glorious.

I think the focus on agency within a narrative should be clear, but I really do want to say - this is why retellings are my favorite. Taking a book that is about the essential nature of humanity from the perspective of a man and flipping its themes solidly is something I will always be in full support of - the meta-textuality of the narrative is absolutely brilliant. And it’s not just about one woman - it’s about the relationships between women and the strength found in them. Mary, Justine, and Elizabeth form such fantastic relationships, and each feels so fully-formed in a way they may not have in the original narrative.”

I will add that, although there were plenty of hints revealing what a narcissistic psychopath Victor was, the twist did take me a little by surprise, and I loved that.  I think part of it was due to re-reading the graphic novel that was based on the original novel.  I kept expecting Frankenstein the monster to kill Elizabeth, and I kept thinking that the monster was also responsible for the deaths of Victor’s little brother William and of the servant Justine, but that was not the case at all.   I think if I hadn't read the graphic novel, I might've clued in sooner, but that's fine, I think I preferred being taken by surprise.

 

Kiersten White did an excellent job setting up the plot twist, and not only that, the denouement was really quite exciting and satisfying.  Mary, the daughter of the book shop owner in Ingolstadt, also has a pivotal role in the denouement, and I’m sure her name is a nod to Shelly.  To be sure, The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein was one of my favourite reads of the year so far.  Highly recommended!

 

p.s. This is yet another winner/recommendation from Monster, She Wrote ! 

2. The Cipher

By Kathe Koja

 

Like Elizabeth Engstrom, I first heard of Kathe Koja in Monster, She Wrote where she was featured in the chapter “Kafka of the Weird".   Koja was also mentioned in Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks from Hell.

 

The Cipher (1991) was Koja’s debut novel and it garnered some praise and awards.  Despite having a cult following, the original Abyss Line (Dell) edition went out of print.  There was an ebook version in 2012, but The Cipher did not get another reprint until 2020 with the Meerkat Press edition, which is what I have pictured.  The Cipher was part of the same book order as Engstrom’s When Darkness Loves Us, so it made sense that I had to read them back-to-back.

 

 

Behold the Funhole.

 

“Shit,” Nakota said, as she always did, her prayer of wonder. She knelt, bending low and supporting herself on straight-stiff arms, closer than I ever did, staring at it. Into it. It was as if she could kneel there all day, painful position but you knew she didn’t feel it, looking and looking. I took my spot, a little behind her, to the left, my own prayer silence: what to say before the unspeakable?

 

Black. Not darkness, not the absence of light but living black. Maybe a foot in diameter, maybe a little more. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you looked at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive, not even something but some—process. Rabbithole, some strange motherfucking wonderland, you bet. Get somebody named Alice, tie a string to her . . . We’d discussed it all, would discuss it again, probably tonight, and Nakota would sit as she always did, straight-backed as a priestess, me getting ripped and ripping into poetry, writing shit that was worse than unreadable in the morning, when I would wake—more properly afternoon, and she long gone, off to her job, unsmiling barmaid at Club 22 and me late again for the video store. She might not come again for days, or a day, one day maybe never. I knew: friends, yeah, but it was the Funhole she wanted. You can know something and never think about it, if you’re any good at it. Me, now, I’ve been avoiding so much for so long that the real trick becomes thinking straight.

 

Beside me, her whisper: “Look at it.”

 

I sometimes thought it had a smell, that negative place; we’d made the expected nervous fart jokes, the name itself—well, you can guess. But there was some kind of smell, not bad, not even remotely identifiable, but there, oh my yes. I would know that smell forever, know it in the dark (ho-ho) from a city block away. I couldn’t forget something that weird.

 

For the millionth time: “Wouldn’t it be wild to go down there?”

 

And me, on cue and by rote, “Yeah. But we’re not.”

 

I wish I had read The Cipher during my teens or early twenties.  I would’ve loved it, much more than I do now.  It’s nihilistic, angsty, darkly funny and very 90’s in its sordid edginess.  In the Meerkat Press edition, author Maryse Meijer penned a personal and insightful afterword about discovering The Cipher when she was thirteen.

I realized that what I had been looking for all along wasn’t a chainsaw wielding maniac or a tortured vampire or a severely haunted house, but something more existentially threatening: what I needed was a Funhole.

 

The Funhole is not a villain, not a creature, not even a thing, per se, but it is terrifying: perfectly round, absolutely dark, and infinitely deep, anything that goes inside it—or merely near it—is changed: insects grow extra heads, dead flesh comes alive, steel melts and dances and burns.  It’s capable of offering pain and a breed of pleasure beyond the limits of reason; but to receive its gifts one must surrender to the unknown. A journey that doesn’t just offer transformation, but demands it. We know, more or less, what the Funhole does, but not why it does it: the Funhole does not ascribe meaning to itself. That is a job left to Nakota and the Dingbats ad Malcolm and the rest, who scramble to make grand interpretations, all of which are, to varying degrees, bullshit… But nobody in the novel gets what they want, not even the Funhole, as Nicholas is only fleetingly, never lastingly, a willing lover; he remains merely the beloved, as Nakota is beloved by him, as the Funhole is beloved by Nakota. Love, in The Cipher, is never requited; and this is one of the novels’ many horrors, a portrait of desires that are almost always selfish and frustrated, bottomless pits into which each individual pours her darkest wishes for transcendence.

The Cipher reminded me of a more existentially mundane, early Clive Barker.  In spirit, it’s more akin to Charles Burns’ Black Hole, a comic exploring the teenage psyche in 1970's suburban America in an existentially supernatural manner. There's no physical black hole, but rather the Black Hole represents the societal fears of the times, ie. STDs and AIDs.  A mysterious plague disfigures and transforms adolescents into monstrous horrors, the perfect narrative device of externalizing the internal angst of the teenager.

 

Having watched Anora a couple of months ago, I couldn’t help but envision Mikey Madison as ruthless and volatile Nakota. 

Nakota, who saw it first: long spider legs drawn up beneath her ugly skirt, wise mouth pursed into nothing like a smile. Sitting in my dreary third-floor flat, on a dreary thrift-shop chair, the window light behind her dull and gray as dirty fur and she alive, giving off her dark continuous sparks. Around us the remains of this day’s argument, squashed beer cans, stolen bar ashtray sloped full. “You know it,” she said, “the black-hole thing, right? In space? Big dark butthole,” and she laughed, showing those tiny teeth, fox teeth, not white and not ivory yellow either like most people’s, almost bluish as if with some undreamed-of decay beneath them. Nakota would rot differently from other people; she would be the first to admit it.

 

The Cipher was beautifully written as it skillfully balanced the existential horror of an inexplicable black hole in the basement of a seedy residential building and the darkly comic cast of disaffected, deadbeat characters that try to exploit the Funhole for their own benefit.  My main complaint was that the writing got somewhat bogged down and repetitive as it drew out Nicholas’ achingly slow transformation via his disjointed and indulgent internal thought processes.  Nicholas’ emptiness and lack of self-esteem counterpointed with Nakota’s sociopathy and bitchiness did get rather tiresome as I got closer to the end.  The ending was a bit disappointing too.  It was a great premise that didn’t quite deliver but I was still nevertheless immersed in the dark decaying urban microcosm that Koje had conjured up.  The story was unusual, uncanny and uncomfortable.  There wasn’t much in the way of gore or violence, but there was a fair amount of gross-out body horror and depravity.  It definitely was not an easy read as observed by this reddit thread.

But nevertheless I’m glad I read it. 

 

1. When Darkness Loves Us

By Elizabeth Engstrom

I first heard of Elizabeth Engstrom in Monster, She Wrote where she was featured in a chapter titled “Monstrosity in the Mundane".

 

Her bio is interesting. Born Betsy Lynn Gutzmer, Engstrom didn’t start writing seriously until well into her thirties when she signed up for a writing workshop in Hawaii. She had lived a full life – she acquired a Masters degree in applied theology and had her own advertising agency, which she sold to embark on a career in fiction writing.  She was also a wife and mother.

 

I was happy to find a new copy of When Darkness Loves Us when I ordered via Abes Books and didn’t really clue into the fact that it was a special reissue when Olman saw me reading it and asked, is that a Paperbacks from Hell?  Turns out When Darkness Loves Us was featured in Grady Hendrix’s book, Paperbacks from Hell.  Looks like Hendrix has given some forgotten or out of print horror books a second life.

 

The reissue even features the cover art by Jill Bauman that graced the cover of the original 1986 Tor paperback.  After finishing the book, I realize how fitting the illustration was -- an old-fashioned doll with a cracked face and a gaping hole where the nose had been broken off.

 

I found it interesting that in Monster, She Wrote, Kröger and Anderson omitted the fact that before Engstrom became a wife, mother and writer, she was a recovered alcoholic.  In Hendrix’s intro, he simply stated that for ten years, Gutzmer was a drunk.  How Engstrom described her past life gave some interesting insight into the kind of stories she wrote:

“I hung with the underbelly of society”, she says. “And the worse they were, they better I felt about myself. I had friends in really low places, and they were the people I was comfortable with. No real identity, living in the shadows, only coming out at night.”

 

According to Hendrix, in Engstrom’s stories, monsters are created, not born.  Monsters also lurk among us and within us.

 

I really wanted to like When Darkness Loves Us.  It was one of the first stories she had developed when she attended Theodore Sturgeon’ workshop.  The premise was interesting, written like a dark fairy tale and barely the length of a novella, it's not more than sixty-odd pages long.  It begins with pregnant sixteen year old Sally Ann, lustfully admiring her young husband from afar while he’s driving a tractor out on their farm.  She decides to explore an abandoned tunnel and ends up being trapped underground for many years.

 

Sally Ann learns to survive in constant darkness, and gives birth to her son (his name is Clint!), who grows up in the cave without ever seeing daylight.  When he’s old enough to be on his own, Sally renews her desire to go to the top, even though her son tries to convince her to stay.  At this point, I stopped reading and tried to imagine where Engstrom was going to go with this.  I imagined Sally would somehow escape and be discovered by her family.  Her reunion with her husband would probably have unexpected consequences, but she would end up abandoning her son.  Even though Clint never wanted to leave the cave, he goes up top in search of his mother.  He becomes the monster in the cave who terrorizes Sally Ann and her family, but only during the night because the sunlight frightens him.

 

But the actual story is much darker and twisted.  The real horror is not being fully welcomed back by your own family because they thought you were dead and have moved on.  On top of that, you’ve become a shrunken twisted version of yourself with missing teeth and blackened lips.

 

I felt that the abrupt shift in POV to Sally’s son when he’s left alone in the darkness didn’t work for me.  Even though it was disturbing to read his innermost thoughts and actions, I felt that this shift was primarily done to shock the viewer with his dark fantasies.  I felt the story would have been stronger had it kept the focus on Sally Ann as it was her story.  Basically, Sally Ann soon learns that she had been gone for twenty years!  So her son wasn't a boy but a man!  Her less attractive sister ended up marrying her husband and they have children of her own.  Sally Ann ends up kidnapping her youngest niece and brings her back to the caves to introduce to her 20 year old son!  

 

The blurb at the back of the book was also terribly written and inaccurate:  Sally Ann and Martha. Two women, searching for love. Finding terror.

 

It made it seem that both Sally Ann and Martha are in the same story.  I thought that Beauty Is… was the name of a new chapter that would continue from When Darkness Loves Us because the last chapter did not have a proper ending.  When I realized it was an entirely different story, I had to re-adjust my expectations.

 

Compared to When Darkness Loves Us, Beauty Is… was 150 pages, more than double the length.

 

Beauty Is… wasn’t as creepy, but it was a good slow-burner and much more effective than When Darkness… I felt that the order should’ve been reversed.  Beauty Is… was the stronger and more developed story.  What they have in common is the rural setting.  Both protagonists grew up on the farm and are either innocent or naïve to the ways of the world before they become damaged by a traumatic event or circumstance.

 

In Beauty Is…, Martha is a middle-aged simpleton living alone in the farmhouse she grew up in.  She goes into town to get some supplies and in her interactions with the townsfolk, it seems that they all look out for her.  The chapters alternate between Martha and her mother Fern, who like Sally Ann, also married a farmer at a young age.  Shortly into her marriage, Fern discovered she has the gift of healing, when she saves the life of a neighbour who had a terrible accident.  Fern soon becomes revered and respected as the town healer, but Harry, her god-fearing husband is suspicious of her gifts, as he thinks that all this good fortune is going to come back and bite them.  Sure enough, their daughter Martha is born without a nose.  Fern loves her anyway but Harry is frightened and disgusted by the sight of his baby.  The real horror is not Martha’s deformity, but how she is treated by her small-minded, heartless father.  As the narrative unfolds, we learn that Martha was not always “simple”.  Something traumatic happened to Martha as a child when Fern had to help someone in an emergency and Martha was left alone with her father.

 

Once you figure out the theme of Beauty Is…, you can see some of the heavy-handedness of the storytelling.  It was still an interesting yet underwhelming read.  Personally, I found the author’s life more fascinating than her works of fiction.