Frankenstein is Mary Shelley’s famous (or infamous) tale of a reanimated monster, which is ironic since this is a story that seems to be “reanimated” on the regular. From retellings to reimaginings, Frankenstein’s monster, made from mismatched body parts and our own anxieties about death, has been stomping through popular culture and will no doubt keep going until humans stop fearing death (which is unlikely to end soon). But these stories aren’t just reanimated dead narratives, however; there are many that revisit the story while offering a new perspective on the source material, such as Tim McGregor’s Eynhallow.
Eynhallow’s main character is not the scientist or his monster, but one Agnes Tulloch, a mother of four who feels increasingly isolated thanks in part to her emotionally abusive husband and because the rocky, secluded island of Eynhallow is not the island paradise her husband promised. Then a mysterious stranger moves to the island to work in secret. Agnes works for and soon befriends the man, not knowing that he is Victor Frankenstein, animator of dead things, or that his monster is looking for Victor to fulfill his promise of a bride.
Many adaptations, like Victor Lavalle’s Destroyer and Frankenstein in Baghdad use more modern settings, complete with modern problems, to inject a dose of relevance into the source material. McGregor goes a different route and expands on a part of Mary Shelley’s original work that had great potential for drama, a drama that pulls main character Agnes into its orbit. McGregor gives Agnes the role of narrator, letting readers learn all about her hardscrabble life and her dreams of escaping it, so when the horror finally comes crashing down on her, readers’ hearts will break for her. Definitely one of the finer reimaginings of the Frankenstein story, Eynhallow demonstrates McGregor’s knack for creating fleshed-out (living flesh, that is) characters.
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