The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales

Preface

Three Scientists

Two Immortals

Leading Men

Gothic Heroines

Loners

Shut-Ins

A Poe Anthology

The Works and Death of H.
P.
Lovecraft

In The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G.
Wells, the mad scientist of the title is keen to transform the animals living in the region of his tropical hideaway into humans.
More finely, he wishes to extract from them their bestial traits and implant in them an
ideal rationality
.
Those animals who have been artificially evolved, although not nearly to the degree the doctor would like, speak of Moreau’s laboratory as the House of Pain.
This is a suitable designation for a place where unnatural and excruciating deeds are practiced.
The name not only suggests the pain of the subjects as they have reason forced upon them, it betokens the pain of reason itself, a faculty every human animal came to possess in some measure when we were transfigured long ago in nature’s laboratory—that House of Pain which remains our home to this day.

To a writer of horror stories, a creature whose business is the depiction of a variety of torturous encounters, the question may arise: Why not take Wells’s story another step or two down the path of pain?
At some point, this general concept becomes particularized.
Perhaps a day arrives when Moreau believes he has hit the mark of creating a perfectly rational being.
But to his dismay he ultimately discovers that he has left far too much of the irrational flowing through his subject’s system.
Once again Dr Moreau has failed in the worst way.
By adding a new character, a fetching lab assistant, we are able to appreciate in full how monstrous the doctor’s ideal truly is.
What a pitiful specimen his latest experiment has produced.
What illogical sentiment the erstwhile beast displays in the presence of the pretty lab assistant.
And the doctor had such high hopes!
Now the creature will require further adjustments in order to nudge its nature closer to that untainted rationality that Moreau values above all else.
Yes, that would provide an extra dose of pain, knowing that the beast will never meet the doctor’s expectations, as we have not, and that its pain will end only with its death on the operating table.

And so the task has been executed.
But once this revamping or disfigurement of Wells’s original hair-raiser has been performed, the horror writer may begin to wonder how similar treatments might be applied to other well-known works of the genre.
Is the literary artist any less curious or fixed upon an ideal than Dr Moreau?
Maybe he will even throw in some of his own once-told tales, the intent being to make these, too, efforts in excessive pain, infinite and eternal pain beyond physical release.

This is how the present volume began and proceeded, with each new story being pushed onward in the direction of its unique and perverse apotheosis of pain.
After Moreau, another overreaching scientist came to the author’s mind: Victor Frankenstein, the consummate creator, which is to say,
recreator
.
Like Moreau, Frankenstein was a criminal.
What could be a worse offense against God and nature than to fabricate a blasphemous replica of a human being?
In Frankenstein’s case, the monster in question is a surprisingly sensitive and intelligent individual who is rejected by others simply by virtue of his hideous appearance.
Was Frankenstein’s fate in the original story really punishment enough for his crime, and could his creature’s life be made even more heartrending?
One might take the position that the pain that young Mary Shelley inflicted on each of them was sufficient as it was.
But sometimes readers of horror tales are not sated by the tragic agonies offered up for their approval.
And if there is a horror writer among them, the stakes may be raised to the very heights of scowling Gothic skies.
This is not done purely for the sake of sadism, to give the screw another turn for the enjoyment of eliciting more screams from those upon the rack.
It is done—it was done—as a means of vicarious self-flagellation, laying the whip most brutally across the backs of fictional characters as a distraction from each lash real life was putting to the writer at a specific time in his life.
In the religious universe, hell exists as a place for others, not as a fate for those who invented it.
But figuratively speaking, we are all doomed to invent our own hells.
And after becoming a resident of some pit, we look around for companions with whom to commiserate—parties to our pain, equals condemned for the same lapses or blunders, whether we intended to commit them or not.

With the second group of stories herein, those featuring Dracula and the Wolfman, certain motifs began to emerge that came to be carried throughout the rest of the book.
These figures cried out of loneliness, yearning, and the rites of romance gone horribly wrong.
Rather than spoil these singular dramas, let us say no more about them in this prelude to an exhibition of pains that by all justice would shatter the world in which they transpire.

There are many stories that might have been reworked and included in this museum of ever-echoing groans and endlessly twisting grimaces.
One of them deserves special mention because it just may serve as a key to all the others.
The story is Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” and its plot is this: A man is convicted of a crime unknown to him until he reads it as a legend that has been inscribed into his flesh by the pain-inflicting harrow of an uncanny machine.
The strangest aspect of this narrative of strange characters, terrains, and devices is the expression of awe upon the condemned man’s face as his crime is revealed upon his body by the piercing contraption.
As the official of the penal colony who is in charge of the execution remarks: “Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted…A moment that might tempt one to get under the harrow itself” (which the official does in the end, only to his grief).
The enlightenment of Kafka’s man on the machine need not be definitive, as it is in the original, but could be only the first in a series of enlightenments, each bringing into view a greater crime than the one before, and each a greater source of pain.
As the harrow keeps writing, the flesh of the man shackled beneath it becomes a palimpsest upon which unimaginable crimes are written…until the greatest crime of all is disclosed.
In the words of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who was an influence on Kafka, “We should regard every man first and foremost as a being who exists only as a consequence of his culpability and whose life is an expiation of the crime of being born.”
Extending Schopenhauer’s statement to make it a bit more chilling, as well as more accurate, we might specify our crime not as that of simply being born, but as being born into the House of Pain.

Dr Moreau is examining the manwolf strapped to the operating table.
He has worked very hard on this one, tearing him by slow and torturous degrees away from his bestial origins.

Today Dr Moreau is curious.
He sees the manwolf gazing at his pretty assistant.
He first tries to read the truth in the manwolf’s eyes but cannot.
Now he must resort to an empirical test.

Very casually Dr Moreau loosens the straps binding the wrists and ankles of the manwolf and then, quietly, leaves the room.
He waits a few moments in the hallway, anxious to allow them enough time.
Finally, opening a thin crack in the door, he peeks inside with one eye.

Well, so much for that
, he thinks, and suddenly steps into the room to confront his two subjects—the assistant: standing rigid with terror; the manwolf: down on one knee like a delirious knight before the menaced lady he would gladly save.

“Idiot!”
screams Dr Moreau, knocking the manwolf’s head a good forty-five degrees to one side with the back of his hand.
“We’ve got a long way to go with these beasts,” he tells his assistant.
“It’s for their own good!”

Then, with disgust, he takes a little gold key from his vest pocket and walks toward a huge door, behind which is a perplexing array of powerful drugs and instruments of unimaginable pain.

The Excruciating Final Days of Dr Henry Jekyll, Englishman

Dr Jekyll has been locked in his laboratory off a busy London bystreet for almost a week now, trying to find the formula that would destroy the insatiable Edward Hyde forever, or at least dissolve him into a few chemicals harmlessly suspended in one’s system.

Late Sunday morning Dr Jekyll awakens on the floor and discovers, to his amazement, the shrunken form of Hyde stirring half-consciously beside him.

They are both a little groggy, and Dr Jekyll is the first to make it to his feet.
For a moment they just stare at each other.
Dr Jekyll can see that Hyde’s ferocious being has been rendered innocuous and tame, the lingering effect, no doubt, of his debauched life.

“I have just the thing,” says Dr Jekyll, cradling Hyde’s head with one arm and forcing a beaker of bubbling fluid to his lips.
Then Dr Jekyll backs away and watches Hyde being overtaken by wrenching convulsions from the poison he has unwittingly ingested.

Someone is now knocking at the laboratory door (the one that leads into the house).
“Dr Jekyll, sir, there’s a young lady here asking for Mr Hyde.
What should I tell her?”

“Just a minute, Poole,” answers Dr Jekyll, smoothing out his crumpled cravat and preparing to deliver the regrettable news that Hyde died days ago in an unfortunate accident of science.
The man would drink anything he could get his hands on, and he knew nothing of chemistry!

But before seeing the young lady, Dr Jekyll wants to examine the corpse of his evil twin.
My God, this poor creature is practically immortal
, he thinks as he drags the faintly gasping body of Edward Hyde toward the gaping and fiery incinerator.

The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein, Citizen of Geneva

Victor Frankenstein has died on board a ship caught in seas of ice near the North Pole.
Subsequently, his body is sent back to his native Switzerland, where, however, there is no one to receive it.
Everyone he ever knew has already died before him.
His brother William, his friend Henry, his wife Elizabeth, and his father Alphonse Frankenstein, among others, are no more.
A minor official in the Genevan civil service comes up with the suggestion to donate the corpse, still very well preserved, to the university at Ingolstadt, where the deceased distinguished himself in scientific studies.

Hans Hoffmann, a prodigy in comparative anatomy at the University of Ingolstadt, is conducting a series of experiments in his apartment.
He has assembled, and is quite sure he can vivify, a human being from various body parts he has bought or stolen.
To consummate his project, which to his knowledge has never been attempted and would certainly make him famous, he still needs a human brain.
He has heard that the body of a former student at the university at Ingolstadt is preserved in the morgue of the medical school.
It seems the man was a brilliant student.
This would be the perfect brain, thinks Hans Hoffmann.
Late one night he breaks into the morgue and helps himself.

“Well,” says Hans Hoffmann on the spectacular evening when the creature first opens its eyes, “aren’t you a beauty!”
This is intended ironically, of course; the creature is quite hideous.
What Hans Hoffmann now notices is that his creation is gazing around the room, as if expecting to see someone who, for the moment, is absent.

“Oh ho,” says the scientist, “I can see I’m going to have trouble with you.
You’ll be begging me one of these days to make you a companion, someone of your own kind.
Well, look here,” says Hans Hoffmann, holding a handful of entrails and part of a woman’s face.
“I’ve already tried to do it, perhaps a little half-heartedly, I admit.
It’s not the same, making a woman, and I don’t have much use for them anyway.”

Hans Hoffmann cannot tell whether or not the creature has understood these words.
Nevertheless, it has an extremely desolate expression on its face (just possibly due to a few collapsed muscles).
Now the creature is staggering around Hans Hoffmann’s apartment, inadvertently breaking a number of objects.
Finally, it stumbles out the door and into the streets of Ingolstadt.
(“Good riddance!”
shouts Hans Hoffmann.)

But as the creature wanders into the darkness, searching for a face it remembers from long ago, it is unaware that the only being in the entire universe who could possibly offer him any comfort has already incinerated himself on a furious pyre deep in the icy wasteland of the North Pole.