The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales by Thomas Ligotti

Preface
     
    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