In Frankenstein, published in 1818, Mary Shelley produced both English Romanticism's finest prose fiction and the world's most famous horror story - a vision of human overreaching and inhumanity that haunts us still. When Victor Frankenstein dares to create life and then recoils in horror from his own creation, he puts into motion an escalating cycle of isolation, grief and vengeance. By setting its tormented Promethean hero in conflict with a shunned and lonely monster who desperately longs for acceptance and companionship, Frankenstein rises far above the Gothic thrillers of its time, and ours. No reader in the grip of Shelley's iconic story can fail to notice how much more compelling the original is than all the adaptations and imitations that have followed in its majestic wake.