Press Release: Frankenstein’s Monster (Paperback Original)
In her adult debut, children’s author Susan Heyboer O’Keefe takes on the godmother of horror in what Publishers Weekly calls “a well-wrought sequel to Mary Shelley’s classic tale”
“Vivid, powerful, gripping and intensely moving: the pace does not relax for a second from beginning to end.”
—Rosalind Miles, New York Times bestselling author of I, Elizabeth
Frankenstein’s Monster
A Novel
By Susan Heyboer O’Keefe
At the close of Mary Shelley’s classic, the creator dies, but what happens to the creation? In Susan Heyboer O’Keefe’s novel Frankenstein’s Monster (Three Rivers Press; October 5, 2010; $15.00), the monster spends the next ten years fleeing from its past, from mankind’s loathing—and from Robert Walton, the ship captain who heard Victor Frankenstein’s final words and vowed to take up the dying man’s chase. When Walton repeats Frankenstein’s mistake, robbing the creature of his bride, he unwittingly resurrects the battle for revenge fought between Frankenstein and his monster in Shelley’s classic.
O’Keefe’s narrative is told through the creature’s journals, revealing its passions, its hatreds, and the depth of its innermost thoughts. As in the original, its failures to end its loneliness and find companionship are heartbreaking. Then the monster rescues a mute woman from slavery, and she chooses to stay with it. Walton murders her—and thus shifts the paradigm of the monster’s world, altering what was once pursuit and flight into a battle for mutual revenge—Walton fighting to lay to rest the vows of a dying man, and to curb the growing hatred fueling him on, and the monster retaliating against the murder of the one person who might have loved it.
To complete its vengeance, the creature abducts Walton’s neice as a prize to be savored later and at length. Bound by unnameable emotion, the two race toward the desolate spot where Frankenstein had long ago created—and then destroyed—the monster’s bride. There the creature discovers that there are monsters in the world more horrible than itself.
Played out against a relentless chase from a decaying Venice to the wild Orkney Islands and finally to a Northumbrian coal mine, this is a tale of violent passion, obsession, revenge, and redemption—the attempt to free oneself from the past and to search for meaning in a sometimes meaningless life.
Frankenstein’s Monster is the compelling tale of a creature in search of its humanity. Publishers Weekly says, “O’Keefe credibly extrapolates the moods and thoughts of the monster from how Shelley first imagined them in one of the better recent treatments of the Frankenstein theme.”
——————————
WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING
“A dark, riveting read full of the most burning passions and intense, soul-searing hatreds, about a monster who longs to be a man and men who behave like monsters.”
—Carolyn Turgeon, Author of Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story
“A haunting, compassionate look at one of the most maligned and misunderstood creatures in literature.”
—Megan Chance, Author of Prima Donna
——————————
SUSAN HEYBOER O’KEEFE is the author of the novel Death by Eggplant, a Disney Adventures Kids’ Choice nominee; the bestselling picture book One Hungry Monster; and the newest addition Hungry Monster ABC. Frankenstein’s Monster is her adult debut. Susan lives in Ringwood, New Jersey, with her husband, son and two parrots. For more information, please visit: www.susanheyboerokeefe.com.
——————————
For more information, or to speak with Susan Heyboer O’Keefe,
please contact Dennelle Catlett at 212-782-9486 / dcatlett@randomhouse.com.