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booknookTitle: Our Hideous Progeny
Author: C.E. McGill
Genre: Horror, historical fiction, gothic fiction
“I loved it. From the moment I first met its strange and terrible eyes, I loved it.” - Our Hideous Progeny, C.E. McGill
I'll be the first to admit that I'm a bit suspicious of retellings and spin-offs by nature. There are some great ones out there, sure, but generally my opinion is that if you really want to make a story your own, you should be twisting it out of its original shape enough to fit a new mold. Not unrecognizable, but not reliant on its original form to survive on its own.
I'm happy to report that Our Hideous Progeny fulfilled my expectations in this sense. Billed as a feminist, queer spin on Frankenstein, its protagonist is Mary Sutherland, who carries on the ill-advised legacy of her great-uncle, Victor von Frankenstein himself. While the concept is fun enough, what caught me from the beginning was the cover. It promised one thing that catches me hook, line, and sinker: prehistoric, hideous beasts.
Mary, as is revealed through her life as a child and onwards, is of a similar nature to myself. As confined as she is in her interests and identity growing up as a woman in 1850s England, from the moment she first sets eyes on a rotting whale carcass it's true love. Truly, I can't blame her.
Though it contains the winding backstory, grand adventures and ponderings on life that one would expect from a gothic historical novel, I would say that this book is most of all about that love. It is a thing that tortures Mary, driving would-be friends away and spoiling opportunities with her passion (the queer metaphor that runs alongside this love of the strange is not meant to be subtle), yet it is the very thing that keeps her moving. Mary is quite unlike her great-uncle in this way: no matter now hideous, no matter who runs away in horror from it and her alike, Mary loves the Creature she creates.
If it loves her back, who knows. This is part and parcel to Mary's life, as we learn throughout the book: a society that doesn't love her back, that favors her husband and her mentor and every other man in the world, no matter his ability and passion in comparison to hers. None of this dissuades her from creating a being that she loves, from carving out a space where she can, with her own monsters.
The book is not afraid to explore the unique aspects of womanhood, and how Mary is shaped by her own identity rather than simply a reskinned male protagonist. One angle that I particularly enjoyed the exploration of was how the Creature was immediately viewed as a child to her (a replacement, no doubt, for the one she lost before the book begins), rather than a creation like it was to Victor Frankenstein. The book does not flinch from this double-sided metaphor, the Creature as both a child and an invention. What role it really takes to her is up to your own thoughts on what the line is between the two.
I found Our Hideous Progeny quite charming, and not simply because I, like Mary, was unaccountably excited for dissections in Biology class. (Though that was admittedly a factor.) While the pacing can drag at times, particularly in the exposition where the exact situations that lead up to the creation of the Creature are painstakingly laid out, this is again quite expected of a Gothic novel, and I found Mary an enjoyable enough protagonist to not mind it so much. I do wish the book spent more time with the Creature itself, but I suppose the original Frankenstein was also far more about the society surrounding the monster than the creation itself. C'est la vie for us monster lovers. Overall, I'd definitely recommend it for a good rainy day, and deeply enjoyed getting to view the world through Mary's perspective. For everything that she has to fight against to be herself, she's pretty damn fun while doing it.
Author: C.E. McGill
Genre: Horror, historical fiction, gothic fiction
“I loved it. From the moment I first met its strange and terrible eyes, I loved it.” - Our Hideous Progeny, C.E. McGill
I'll be the first to admit that I'm a bit suspicious of retellings and spin-offs by nature. There are some great ones out there, sure, but generally my opinion is that if you really want to make a story your own, you should be twisting it out of its original shape enough to fit a new mold. Not unrecognizable, but not reliant on its original form to survive on its own.
I'm happy to report that Our Hideous Progeny fulfilled my expectations in this sense. Billed as a feminist, queer spin on Frankenstein, its protagonist is Mary Sutherland, who carries on the ill-advised legacy of her great-uncle, Victor von Frankenstein himself. While the concept is fun enough, what caught me from the beginning was the cover. It promised one thing that catches me hook, line, and sinker: prehistoric, hideous beasts.
Mary, as is revealed through her life as a child and onwards, is of a similar nature to myself. As confined as she is in her interests and identity growing up as a woman in 1850s England, from the moment she first sets eyes on a rotting whale carcass it's true love. Truly, I can't blame her.
Though it contains the winding backstory, grand adventures and ponderings on life that one would expect from a gothic historical novel, I would say that this book is most of all about that love. It is a thing that tortures Mary, driving would-be friends away and spoiling opportunities with her passion (the queer metaphor that runs alongside this love of the strange is not meant to be subtle), yet it is the very thing that keeps her moving. Mary is quite unlike her great-uncle in this way: no matter now hideous, no matter who runs away in horror from it and her alike, Mary loves the Creature she creates.
If it loves her back, who knows. This is part and parcel to Mary's life, as we learn throughout the book: a society that doesn't love her back, that favors her husband and her mentor and every other man in the world, no matter his ability and passion in comparison to hers. None of this dissuades her from creating a being that she loves, from carving out a space where she can, with her own monsters.
The book is not afraid to explore the unique aspects of womanhood, and how Mary is shaped by her own identity rather than simply a reskinned male protagonist. One angle that I particularly enjoyed the exploration of was how the Creature was immediately viewed as a child to her (a replacement, no doubt, for the one she lost before the book begins), rather than a creation like it was to Victor Frankenstein. The book does not flinch from this double-sided metaphor, the Creature as both a child and an invention. What role it really takes to her is up to your own thoughts on what the line is between the two.
I found Our Hideous Progeny quite charming, and not simply because I, like Mary, was unaccountably excited for dissections in Biology class. (Though that was admittedly a factor.) While the pacing can drag at times, particularly in the exposition where the exact situations that lead up to the creation of the Creature are painstakingly laid out, this is again quite expected of a Gothic novel, and I found Mary an enjoyable enough protagonist to not mind it so much. I do wish the book spent more time with the Creature itself, but I suppose the original Frankenstein was also far more about the society surrounding the monster than the creation itself. C'est la vie for us monster lovers. Overall, I'd definitely recommend it for a good rainy day, and deeply enjoyed getting to view the world through Mary's perspective. For everything that she has to fight against to be herself, she's pretty damn fun while doing it.
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