Strange Star

The year is 1816, and five friends in a Swiss villa are trying to tell a ghost story that will “freeze the blood.” The setting that spawned Frankenstein is reimagined here first through the eyes of Felix, a young African-American former slave anxious to stay in the employ of Lord Byron, and then through the tale of Lizzie, a British girl who collapses at the doorstep on the stormy evening of their game. Lizzie’s story involves a lightning strike that has left her blind and scarred, and it features the unscrupulous scientist Miss Francesca Stine, who is determined to prove that electricity can bring people back to life. Positing Lizzie’s tale as the inspiration for Shelley’s, Carroll incorporates and adapts many of the themes canvassed in Frankenstein while cleverly updating notions of appearance- and gender-based prejudice into contemporary sensibilities, wrapping it all up into a swift and accessible narrative. Lizzie’s near-blindness, while important as one such adapted theme, does make her success in tracking the group to Switzerland somewhat less than credible, but her intrepid and obstinate nature is well enough established for plausibility, as is Felix’s presence in the story as a black footman in the employ of a well-heeled English [End Page 282] gentleman and Miss Stine as a woman plagued with ambitions she cannot openly pursue. Fans of YA Frankenstein remakes will want to add this to their reading list alongside Priestley’s Mister Creecher, Oppel’s This Dark Endeavor, and Lee’s This Monstrous Thing (BCCB 10/11, 9/11, and 10/15).