Recommendations
Books Like Frankenstein
Best books to read after Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Frankenstein asks the question that science hasn't stopped answering: what do we owe the beings we create? Mary Shelley's novel remains as urgent as when she wrote it at eighteen. These books share its meditation on creation, isolation, the ethics of ambition, and the creature's longing to be understood.
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Dracula
by Bram Stoker
Stoker's epistolary vampire novel is the other great pillar of Victorian Gothic horror alongside Frankenstein — both create monsters that reflect anxieties about transgression, both use the monster as a figure for the outcast seeking connection, and reading them together reveals how late Victorian literature was obsessed with the boundary between the living and the dead
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The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
A scientist discovers a drug that separates his respectable and depraved selves into two distinct persons — the most thematically direct companion to Frankenstein in its exploration of the hubris of scientific experimentation, the double, and the monster that science creates; both Shelley and Stevenson use their scientists to ask whether the capacity to do something constitutes the right to do it
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The Island of Doctor Moreau
by H.G. Wells
Wells's science fiction horror novel about a scientist who vivisects animals to create human-like hybrids — the most direct Victorian-era descendent of Frankenstein in its exploration of what we owe to beings we have altered through scientific intervention, and in its critique of a scientist so committed to his work that he has lost the moral capacity to question it
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Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro's novel about human clones raised as organ donors asks Frankenstein's core question from the creature's perspective — three children grow up in an English boarding school not yet understanding what they are or what fate awaits them; the devastating irony of their acceptance is Ishiguro's version of the creature's tragedy: a being created by human ambition, used for human benefit, denied the human acknowledgment it deserves
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Oryx and Crake
by Margaret Atwood
Atwood's post-apocalyptic novel follows a scientist who engineers a new species to replace a humanity he considers irredeemably flawed — a direct contemporary descendent of Frankenstein in its meditation on the hubris of creation and the unintended consequences of scientific ambition, and in its question about whether the new beings are better off than the ones they replace
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Klara and the Sun
by Kazuo Ishiguro
An artificial friend narrates the world from the perspective of a solar-powered android sold to be a child's companion — Ishiguro returns to the question he first raised in Never Let Me Go: what inner life does a created being have, and what does it mean that we created it for our use? Klara is in many ways the creature of Frankenstein retold as a quiet, hopeful narrator who never stops trying to understand the humans who made her
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The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
Atwood's dystopian novel about a theocratic American republic that reduces women to reproductive vessels shares Frankenstein's core anxiety about the ethics of using bodies as instruments — both novels are ultimately about what happens when one group of humans claims the right to determine the humanity of another, and about the cost of power that refuses to be questioned
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Piranesi
by Susanna Clarke
Clarke's novel about a man who lives in a labyrinthine house of infinite halls and tides, keeping meticulous journals of his world, not knowing how he came to be there — a dreamlike, philosophical novel that asks Frankenstein's question (what is the human need to understand one's own creation and origin?) in a completely unexpected formal register
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