Victor Frankenstein is a brilliant and ambitious young scholar consumed by a single forbidden question: whether the spark of life itself might be mastered by human hands. Laboring in feverish secrecy, cut off from family and friends, he pieces together a living creature from lifeless matter and, one dreary night, succeeds in giving it breath. But the moment his creation opens its eyes, triumph curdles into horror, and Victor flees from the very being he worked so long to make. Shelley's haunting 1818 masterwork, the first great science-fiction novel, sets a man and the creature he abandoned loose upon the world.