Remarkably, a nineteen-year-old, writing her first novel, penned a tale that combines tragedy, morality, social commentary, and a thoughtful examination of the very nature of knowledge , writes Leslie S. Klinger. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often reductively dismissed as a monster film or a cautionary tale about experimental science gone haywire. Illuminating every hidden dimension of the first truly modern myth , Klinger does for Shelley’s story of early nineteenth-century horror what he did for Sherlock Holmes, Dracula and H.P. Lovecraft, bringing this gothic tale to nightmarish life by reproducing the original text with the most lavishly illustrated and comprehensively annotated edition to date.