Fans of Mary Shelley's novel and the many movies it's engendered will find little new in this lavishly designed faux journal by the famously mad scientist. The best parts of this heavily illustrated debut fiction are the annotations providing all sorts of real and spurious background information to the diaries (supposedly written between 180821): Kay (director of the American Museum of Cartoon Art) includes potted little histories of scientific knowledge during the period, and of the subjects Victor Frankenstein would have studied at the university, from electricity to anatomy, complete with the strange practices that were then considered science. The author's line drawings of the ancestral castle, Victor's laboratories, and the Monster itself all resemble the best alternative comic-book art, and Kay delights in the details of Frankenstein's equipment. The journal entries themselves are less interesting, though, and add little beyond a record of Victor's mental disintegration. The facts are well known: his early failed experiments; his loathsome assistant Franz; his body-snatching; his studies in alchemy and his search for the ``sources of life.'' No sooner does he succeed in reanimating a cadaver than he fears he's unleashed something horrific, and the Monster proves how apt those fears are over the next two years as it tracks its creator across Europe. Eventually, it even demands a mate. The Monster kills Victor's brother and wife and becomes the hunted rather than the hunter as Victor searches the world over for the hideous creature. The mad scientist's end on an ice floe is reflected in the wobbly handwriting of the final entries. Kay's single most important deviation seems the least tenable: He has Victor deny any Godlike aspirations, which clearly goes against just about everything that's most compelling in previous books and movies. A curiosity that will interest obsessive fans but confuse the uninitiated. (150 two-color illustrations; 1 gatefold)
Pub Date: May 17, 1996
ISBN: 0-87951-511-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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