Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus is the haunting tale of a scientist who attempts to create a man but instead creates a creature who he spurns, thus setting the creature upon his loved ones in a monstrous revenge story. In 1816, ‘the year without summer’, Shelley, her future husband Percy Shelley and Lord Byron set out to see who could write the best horror story. Shelley was stuck until she had a dream of a man animating a corpse. She described the dream in her 1831 edition of the novel: I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful en
gender is my weapon I conceal, carry; hold close but never unholster they call this a privilege; to disappear into a crowd I’m assumed cisgender and straight to the untrained eye which is to say this is the default setting they call this ‘passing’ which is to say someone else has failed which is to say I am only worthy when I am invisible.
The whip comes down on my back once more, but I can't feel it, having lost count of how many lashings have rained down upon me. In front of me, a crowd watches with blank yet solemn faces, not daring to say a word. Public punishments are nothing new and every time one occurs – which has been happening more and more frequently lately – the will of the people falters. The loaf of bread I worked so hard to obtain sits on the platform beside me, covered in flecks of my blood. It is proof that my family will perish, waiting for me to return home. Everyone is hungry, so much so that three of the ‘witnesses’ to my ‘crime’ testified against me and received the gold reward for reporting offences agai