The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

Description

Another dazzling example of the power of Peter Ackroyd's imagination - a brilliant novel written in the voice of Victor Frankenstein himself featuring Shelley and Mary Shelley as characters in the story. Victor Frankenstein begins his anatomy experiments in a barn in the secluded village of Headington, near Oxford. The coroner's office provides the corpses he needs - but they have often died by violent means and are damaged and putrifying. Victor moves his coils and jars and electrical fluids to a deserted pottery manufactury in Limehouse. And, from Limehouse, makes contact with the Doomesday Men - the resurrectionists.Victor pays better than any hospital for the bodies of the very recently dead. Even so, perfect specimens are hard to come by... until that Thames-side dawn when Victor, waiting, wrapped in his greatcoat, on his wooden jetty, hears the splashing of oars and sees in the half-light that slung into the stern of the approaching boat is the corpse of a handsome young man, one hand trailing in the water....

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London- The Biography, Thames- Sacred River and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.

"A thrilling concoction ... Ackroyd's telling of the tale is a worthy revival - I found his book so creepy I kept the bedroom light on all night" Daily Express "A brilliant jeu d'esprit. Above all, it stands as a tribute to the power of the human imagination" Daily Telegraph "Ackroyd takes Mary Shelley's hint of a doppelganger and plays with it fascinatingly in a fast-paced thriller which also nods towards the notion of split personality enshrined in Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde... The novel leaps to its climax nimbly as a pursuing fiend, adn ends suitably in fiery revelation" -- Michele Roberts Independent "Distinguished Frankensteinian fantasia...Ackroyd loves taking what we, the general reading public, think we know about great writers, only to twist that knowledge into new fictional shapes...Ackroyd is the great pretzel-baker of contemporary fiction. And this is one of his tastiest, and twistiest, products so far" Financial Times "Terrifying and fascinating in equal measure" The Times