“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster; and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you,” said Friedrich Nietzsche. Strangely, this is appropriate. In the tale of Frankenstein and his misbegotten monster, however, who is the monster; who is the abyss? “It is surely the monster,” some say. “No,” say others, “it is Frankenstein himself.” While Shelley will always hold high honors for creating such a splendiferous literary work, many other authors have reworked this classic tale to fit their own ideas of what should have happened and what will happen better. Dean Koontz is one such author. He switches the roles of monster and man quite well. Through these two very different accounts of the same tale, this thing called evil is paralleled, and the roles are reversed.
Koontz tells the story of Frankenstein over the course of three books that are set in modern day New Orleans. Victor Frankenstein survived his artic ordeal to live to be over two hundred years old thanks to his twisted knowledge of science. “Looping through his torso, embedded in his flesh, entwining his ribs, spiraling around his spine, a flexible metallic cord and its associated implants converted simple electrical current – to which he submitted himself twice a day – into a different energy, a stimulation charge that sustained a youthful rate of cellular division and held biological time at bay (Prodigal Son, Koontz, 142).” Victor Frankenstein now calls himself Victor Helios; he is a very wealthy man who lives in a huge estate. He still makes his creatures, but now they are even more deadly and powerful then before. And they look more human. He calls them the New Race; their purpose is to exterminate the Old Race – which would be normal people. It is difficult to tell New Race from Old Race. The New Race comes in every shape, size, and color; some are beautiful and some ugly. His creations are no longer made in a haphazard lab; now they are Mercy born and Mercy raised. Mercy refers to an old hospital Victor bought and converted into his laboratory. He has the ability to mass-created them now, and instead of it taking him a year or more, he can do it in a span of a few months, be it man or woman, child, adult, or senior. The New Race are educated by direct to brain downloading, Victor giving them everything they need to know. The New Race are nothing but drones that Victor rules like a queen bee rules her hive. They cannot kill unless Victor tells them to kill. They cannot commit suicide, and they cannot harm Victor – they are programmed against both. Koontz has Victor deem himself a god, for “…His body was a mass of scars and strange excrescences, but he found them beautiful. They were the consequences of the procedures by which he’d gained immortality; they were the badges of his divinity (Prodigal Son, Koontz, 142).”
And yet there is still his first. The first Frankenstein monster does not live in the artic. He now lives at a Tibetan Monastery. He has given himself the name of Deucalion. The monks do not fear him; they have made him one of their own. In the course of two hundred years, Deucalion has learned to control the murderous rage that resides inside him. He has become a calm, peaceful creature. Part is due to the monks – the other is thanks to thinking that his creator has died and that no more must the world be plagued with his insanity. Deucalion also has this strange bond with nature and the heavens. The spark from the lightning that gave him life also gave him the ability to transcend time and space, a strange understanding of magic, and an otherworldly pulse that shines in his eyes from time to time. It is a good life until Deucalion receives word that Victor is indeed still alive and doing quite well. Deucalion fingers the right side of his face; he is a beautiful man to the point of saying handsome, but the right side of his face is disfigured and scared from his first and (to that point) only attempt to kill Victor – Victor fought back. Deucalion was not programmed the same way as the New Race; he can kill. Before Deucalion leaves, the head monk, Nebo, tattoos it with symbols for protection.
Deucalion must only snap his fingers and he is standing in New Orleans at the Luxe Theater, a place left to him by a dead friend. It is here, in New Orleans, that he enlists the help of Detective Carson O’Connor and her partner Michael Maddason. The two homicide detectives were tangled up in this unfortunate turn of events while investigating a series of murders by a man dubbed the Surgeon. Body parts and organs have gone missing, and, while the reader thinks that it is Victor, it has nothing to do with him at all. They stumble upon one of his creations, however, since they have two hearts, and O’Connor knows right away something is wrong. She agrees to help Deucalion and together the two convince Maddason to help as well.
Victor’s perfect world is beginning to fall apart. There is a renegade creature that is quickly mutating. He has been able to override the command not to kill, and has in fact killed several people in search of happiness, for it seems to this renegade that the New Race is not happy – at least not like the Old Race. But there is something wrong with him, something that Victor himself could not even conceive. There is something growing inside of him, and he thinks that he is about to give birth. This mutation bursts out of him, leaving him hollow and dead. Victor’s dream is dying, and there is nothing he can do about it.
This is where book one ends. Book two, City of Night, picks up after this. Victor sends two of his best assassins to kill O’Connor and Maddason. The female is baby-crazy; the New Race cannot give birth. She envies all Old Race women, wishing to kill them all. Indeed, copulation is just something to be had as an outlet. New Race join with New Race, it doesn’t matter about age, color, gender, or social standing. Victor is the only one that can create life; sex is just there.
Now O’Connor and Maddason must fight these killers and figure out a way to kill Victor without they themselves getting killed. Things are working against them. Victor has killed all other Old Race that came in contact with the dead of his New Race and replaced them with New Race clones who, for the most part, act just like their Old Race counterparts. It is difficult to tell who is friend and who is foe.
Victor’s dreams further crumble. His house staff, made entirely out of New Race, begin to malfunction; the butler chewed off each of his fingers – he had overridden the suicide program. Not only this, but other New Race that had been integrated into society begin to malfunction. A pastor tried to kill himself and fails. Friends try to help him – they think he is part of the Old Race and do not know anything of the New Race. They call O’Connor and Maddason to help. O’Connor calls for Deucalion. The New Race and The First speak for a while when finally the pastor Laffite asks Deucalion if he will grant him the one thing he really wants – if Deucalion will grant him release. “Deucalion recited: ‘Behold, he is all vanity. His works are nothing. His molten images are wind and confusion.’… To Deucalion, Laffite said, ‘You chose a verse that describes… Helios (City of Night, Koontz, 307).” “… ‘I can give you what you want most,’ Deucalion told him. ‘I think… yes… I have just lost the ability to switch off pain.’ ‘Have no fear. I will make it painless (City of Night, Koontz, 307).” So, Deucalion grants not only Pastor Laffite, but also another the release that they so desperately want as their programs begin to break down. Deucalion is kind. He doesn’t want them to suffer.Book two ends with Victor’s New Race wife, Erika, sipping wine on the back porch and perhaps contemplating revenge, for “The perfect hostess is creative, patients, and has a long memory – as does a wise wife (City of Night, Koontz, 455).” Book three has not yet come out.
Throughout these 177 chapters, glimpses of Victor’s past life, or at least Koontz’s twisted take on it, are show to the reader. Briefly, it is seen why he created the monster. The reader is shown how Deucalion kills Victor’s first wife, and why he left Europe. It is shown how he perfected his creation technique, and why he insists on creating the New Race.
Shelly, on the other hand, the mother of Frankenstein and his monster, portrays Victor as a confused, misguided man; a youth hungry for knowledge. The reader can sympathize with Victor. His mother died when he was a young man. He had always been a studious lad and somewhat introverted. He just wants to understand how things work when one comes right down the root of his problems. Nature fascinates him. The lightning, the fire, everything. Perhaps a line from a song by Nana Kitade would be best to describe him from Shelly’s viewpoint; strangely it is called “Kesenai Tsumi”, which is Japanese for “Inerasable Sin”, and goes: “I remember the painfulness of the love I lost back then/ I’m a little perplexed by the vivid blue of the sky.” It is appropriate not only because it describes Victor, but also because his mistakes touch and change not only his life but the lives (and in some cases lack thereof) of people he loves, and no matter what he does nothing at all can ever change the events that he set into motion. He is stuck. The monster takes away everything that Victor has ever held dear. The monster ruined his old life. He can never go back – ever. His soul is broken, his heart shattered, into so many little pieces that no matter how hard anyone tried, no one has the ability to put the tiny shards back together again. He dies a barren man, old long before his time.
The reader has a love/hate relationship with the monster. When the creature relates his tale of what happened to him after he left Victor, the reader feels sorry for the brut. All he wants is love. He wants to belong. Many people can relate to this feeling, because, in a society as organized at today, that’s all anybody wants. Shelly makes it so the reader is able to associate with the beast. She humanizes it somewhat. It’s not to the point that one loves him totally, but so that there is an underlying understanding of why the creature does the things that he does. But at the same time, she makes him do cruel things to Victor. She has the monster kill his best friend, his little brother, his wife, and ultimately his father. Victor is left alone in the world. He has no one. But the monster has no one as well. But still, this is where the hate plays in. Victor could take the pain of being tortured himself, but he could not bear to see those he loved killed by the hands of the beast which his hands created. One almost wishes the brute death.
In Shelly’s tale, the line of good and evil is not as clearly drawn as in Koontz’s reworking. There are times when the reader hates Victor and loves the monster, and visa versa. In Koontz’s, however, the reader wants Victor dead because of the things Koontz has him do. Koontz portrays Victor as a mad scientist, a self-deemed god, a power hungry fool. Shelly portrays him as a confused, beaten man. The reader wants Victor to win in Shelly’s and
fall in Koontz’s. Likewise, the reader wants the monster to fall in Shelly’s and win in Koontz’s. Shelly has the reader believe that the monster is, yes, confused, but also vengeful and has no control over the rage inside of him. Koontz leads the reader down another path. Koontz has the reader see that the monster is trying to defend and protect the humans which had shunned him centuries before. He makes the monster the protagonist and Victor the antagonist, whereas, in Shelly’s, Victor is the protagonist and the monster the antagonist. The roles are completely reversed. Good and evil are switched.
Shelly’s reasons are a little better seen as to why she chose to do it this way. A fiend will always be a fiend, and nothing good can come of a abomination. Koontz, however; why did he switch the roles? Did he want to shine a new light on the monster? Did he have another idea of what Victor was really like; why he wanted to create life in the first place? Perhaps it is both of these, and perhaps it is neither. Either way, Shelly, the mother of the Frankenstein legacy, and Koontz, one of the many sons and daughters of it, both accomplish rather well the ideas out with which they set. There is good, and there is evil, and the world still turns. There are those who are just misguided, and those who are just crazy, and still the world turns. There is pain and suffering, and there is joy and laughter, and still the world turns.
Good becomes evil, evil becomes good, and yet, in reality, there is no black and white, only gray. There is no clear way to tell, because, as James Baldwin put it, “Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart, for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.” So then, there are two very different takes on the same story. One gave birth to the legacy. The other was merely a retelling of the classic tale. They have one thing in common: there is good, and there is evil; the roles, however, are harshly reversed a full 180 degrees.
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