A recent novella, Breathe(2004), considers the
possibility that environmental problems within
very large building complexes could actually affect
the personalities of people working within them,
leading to insanity and homicide. Fowler has con-
tinued to write first-class short fiction, occasionally
with supernatural content. His newer collections
include Flesh Wounds (1995), Dracula’s Library
(1997), and Uncut(1999). Given recent trends in
Fowler’s writing, he seems likely to recede to a pe-
ripheral position within the horror genre, but his
work during the 1990s demonstrates the potential
for him to be a significant figure within the field
should he return to his original interests.
France, Anatole(Anatole-François Thibault)
(1844–1924)
The French writer Anatole-François Thibault, who
won the Nobel Prize for literature, wrote a substan-
tial body of work, of which several titles are fantasy,
often involving Christian allegories or a satire of
Christian principles. The most famous and success-
ful of these is The Revolt of the Angels(1914). The
central character is a guardian angel on Earth who
discovers through his researches that the Christian
concept of the order of things is incorrect and that
its adherents have been defrauded into worshipping
a minor deity. He decides to organize a rebellion
among the fallen angels presently in the vicinity of
Paris along with certain disaffected angels still in
good standing and recruits Lucifer to lead the re-
volt. Lucifer, however, declines to involve himself
even though modern technology has provided mor-
tal man with more powerful weapons than those
available to the minions of Jehovah. An amusing
subplot involves the efforts of a mortal Christian to
reconvert his guardian angel. The satire was rather
daring for its time but is tame by contemporary
standards, though still quite effective.
France’s other major fantasy novel is Penguin
Island(1909). This is also a satire in which a near-
sighted priest mistakenly baptizes an island full of
penguins, as a consequence of which they are all
miraculously transformed into a sort of human be-
ings and undergo a history that parallels our own,
allowing France to poke fun at a variety of human
institutions and failings. Several of his shorter
works also contain fantastic elements, primarily re-
ligious, as in “The Juggler of Notre Dame” (1892,
also known as “Our Lady’s Juggler”) and “Saint
Satyr” (1909). Others are ghost stories, the best of
which are “The Mass of the Shadows” (1892) and
“Leslie Wood” (1896). “The Kingdom of the
Dwarfs” (1899, also known as “The Honey-Bee”)
involves kidnapping by dwarves, and “The Shirt”
(1920) is a nonheroic quest story.Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
Mary Shelley(1818)
Although even now many people confuse the
name of Victor Frankenstein with that of his
nameless monster, the basic plot of that early novel
is one of the most familiar in all of literature, and if
our mental image is forever shaped by Boris
Karloff’s screen portrayal, it is as much because of
the power of Shelley’s original imaginative concep-
tion as it is of the impressive efforts of Hollywood.
We use the term Frankensteinas a shortcut to de-
scribe a situation in which an individual is de-
stroyed by his own creator and also as the
archetype of the mad scientist, the seeker after
truth who loses his sense of morality in his quest
for knowledge of the secrets of the universe. The
original novel is claimed both by horror and sci-
ence fiction writers, the latter because the monster
is restored to life through scientific means, how-
ever improbable, rather than through magic or the
occult. Mary SHELLEYundoubtedly drew inspira-
tion from the legend of the golem, although her
creation was fashioned of mismatched human parts
rather than of completely artificial origin. The ini-
tial impetus to write her classic novel came from a
competition involving the poets Percy Shelley and
Lord Byron, among others, but hers was the only
entry to achieve widespread fame.
Victor Frankenstein is a wealthy man with a
promising future who is married to a beautiful and
devoted wife, a member of a respected family. He is
driven, unfortunately, by an obsession that grows
more powerful with each passing day—the desire
to create life where it did not previously exist, al-
though in practice he may be reanimating rather
than creating since presumably he is working with
organic material. He clandestinely gathers the rawFrankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus 121