More than 200 years after it was first published, Mary Shelley's  Frankenstein  has stood the test of time as a gothic masterpiece—a classic work of horror that blurs the line between man and monster.

"If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear."

For centuries, the story of Victor Frankenstein and the monster he created has held readers spellbound. On the surface, it is a novel of tense and steadily mounting dread. On a more profound level, it illuminates the triumph and tragedy of the human condition in its portrayal of a scientist who oversteps the bounds of conscience, and of a creature tortured by the solitude of a world in which he does not belong. A novel of almost hallucinatory intensity, Mary Shelley's  Frankenstein  represents one of the most striking flowerings of the Romantic imagination.