Marsha's Reviews > Teen Frankenstein: High School Horror

Tor, short for Victoria, is our stand-in for Victor Frankenstein. Like the titular doctor from Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, there is a certain moral iciness at her center. Victor Frankenstein displayed a horror for his resurrected creation, then shameful negligence as he abandoned the stitched together newborn. Foolishly determined to forget the daemon, as he called it, he let it careen all over the countryside burning houses, murdering his young brother, his best friend and his new bride.

The modern iteration starts out with Tor recounting her latest scientific failure to raise a rat from the dead. What is her motivation for this dubious act? Is she doing this to help mankind bring back their lost loved ones? Is she trying to promote scientific knowledge? No, we can’t infer that from the text. She’s annoyed by this failure and all the previous ones since failure is not going to win her the coveted Nobel prize. So we have a teenage genius slavering to gain a prize that will also net her a considerable monetary gain.

Tor isn’t squeamish about cutting into carcasses, risking her life (and that of her friend/assistant/sidekick Owen) by generating electricity while standing on a damp floor or bringing back an unfortunate car accident victim from the dead.

As an accident victim suffers from the impact, we see something of human decency from Tor at last. The author ably describes her shock, misery, guilt and horror as she contemplates the unknown dying from the collision she has caused. But all that empathy swiftly vanishes as she sees the accident as opportunity.

She’s contemptuous to her assistant Owen, alternately chiding him for nausea, dismissing him when he doesn’t follow her thoughts or using him when she needs his services. She constantly lies to her mother. She allows her creation Adam to date a girl as an experiment to expand his emotional spectrum while she observes his interactions with the living. She is determined to see Adam as being innocent of heinous crimes because he’s HERS not because she believes his innate nature to be good. She shows pride in Adam’s achievements but only as they reflect on her. She’s the one who brought him back from the dead, after all. She’s the only reason he’s still alive so why shouldn’t she take pride in his accomplishments?

Tor is brilliant and often sees others as being stupider than she. Like many brilliant people, she wonders why others aren’t as sane as she is or don’t see things her way. She is arrogant, lacking in compassion, short on social graces, a sloppy dresser because she sees no reason to dress up (For what? School? Her drunken mother? Her best friend Owen?) and barely tolerates others who drift into her social circle.

Matters go from bad to worse as Tor must dodge Adam’s increasingly erratic behavior, her only friend’s growing horror and disgust and the very real possibility that Adam is a killer…and there’s someone out there who knows what she’s done. All this plus the horror of high school.

There’s something unsettling and slightly giddy about it all. It’s a dive deep into the viscous end of the bloody pool as Victoria navigates around sudden unwelcome popularity, the possibility of date rape and a psycho on the loose. It’s like a 1980s horror flick, with adolescents winding up dead and mutilated while a hatchet/machete/knife-wielding maniac is on the loose. (I guessed the identity of the murderer by chapter 18, by the way. There were just too many clues pointing to him to ignore.)

You wonder who has the poorer social skills: Victoria or her resurrected dead boy. You wonder if Victoria would be better off without the kind of fair-weather friends she makes after Adam proves to be a football prodigy. You worry for the fictional future world as Victoria stubbornly refuses to admit defeat. Fear the genius with ice where their blood should be.