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Book Review: His Unburned Heart (Selected Papers from the Consortium for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena #1) by David Sandner

Cover art for His Unburned Heart by David Sandner

His Unburned Heart (Selected Papers from the Consortium for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena #1) by David Sandner

Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2024

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1947879768

Available: Paperback

Buy: Bookshop.org  |  Amazon.com

 

His Unburned Heart is the first in a series of novellas connected by a frame story of being published by the fictional Consortium for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena. Monster Librarian has previously review volume 2, 12 Hours, and volume 3, Asylum. They’re all very different in tone, topic, and style: what they have in common is that each is about an inexplicable change to reality.

 

The first half of His Unburned Heart is a novella of the same name, and a reasonably straightforward piece of historical fiction. Prior knowledge of the people and events is helpful in providing context. Mary Shelley is well known as the author of Frankenstein. She lived an unconventional life as a young woman, marrying the notorious Romantic poet  Percy Shelley.. He and a friend set off sailing into a major storm over Mary’s objections, and disappeared. Their bodies were washed ashore much later. Italian laws about contagion meant that Percy’s body would have to be burned, but Mary, as a woman, was not allowed to come. Instead, his publisher Leigh Hunt, and their friends Edward Trelawney and Lord Byron attended. After the body had burned, Trelawney saw that Shelley’s heart had not burned away and pulled it out of the ashes. Leigh Hunt left with Shelley’s unburned heart. Those are the facts.

 

Sandner’s novella has Mary determined to witness Percy’s cremation regardless of what the law says. She goes to her friend Mrs. Mason, who disguises her as a man, allowing her to pose as one of Lord Byron’s footmen (Lord Byron sees through the disguise but says nothing). On seeing that Leigh Hunt has kept Percy’s heart, she visits and demands it back, but he refuses, so Mary enlists her stepsister Claire into helping her break in and steal the heart (Mary had a complex relationship with Claire, with a history that is only obliquely referred to: Sandner captures this in just a few lines). Sandner’s spare style uniquely draws characters whose thoughts can’t be guessed, such as Lord Byron.

 

The second half of the book is titled “The Journal of Sorrow”. In it Mary first recounts the weeks and days before Percy left on his trip, including a vivid description of a miscarriage where she nearly bled to death before a doctor could arrive at their isolated home, Percy’s intervention of bathing her in freezing water saved her life. The  depiction of her miscarriage, bleeding, and freezing, is terrifying and has a visceral impact.

 

This prologue is followed by a series of dreams or imaginings of Percy’s last hours: In her journal, Mary writes, “Some stories cannot be told except as fragments, as dreams, fits… I hold them out to you–dead leaves to quicken some new birth…” These short fragments all approach his drowning and death from different imagined angles, and somehow this unconventional, stream-of-consciousness style of writing becomes not only a series of strange encounters with Shelley and the deep, but a shape of Mary’s feelings about him. I found The Journal of Sorrow and its intense, brief, and dreamlike writing to be an incredibly powerful expression of imagination, guilt, grief, anger, regret, and love.

 

His Unburned Heart does require background knowledge to be fully appreciated, but this is a perfect Valentine’s gift for the horror lover, and for those readers especially interested in the lives of Mary and Percy Shelley this is a treat. Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on August 17, 2024 by , Reply

Book Review: Mary’s Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein by Lita Judge

Mary’s Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein by Lita Judge

Roaring Brook Press, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1626725003

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition

 

After the flood of books about Frankenstein and Mary Shelley that accompanied the bicentennial of the first publication of the book last year,  despite my fascination with both, I was pretty exhausted from reading about them by the time 2019 rolled around, but Mary’s Monster is something special. This verse biography of Mary Shelley’s life is framed by imagined commentary from the Creature itself. While in a text-only format this might not have worked, nearly every page is also a visual feast, pairing Lita Judge’s free verse with incredible black-and-white watercolor illustrations, for nearly 300 pages. The powerful illustrations integrated into the text reminded me at times of A Monster Calls, but that is a fictional prose novel, while this is nonfiction– a detailed verse biography. Judge structured the book into nine parts, to represent the nine months it took Mary to finish writing Frankenstein, and also the same length as a pregnancy. Mary’s thoughts about creation, love, abandonment, despair, and destruction were central to her identity, and she certainly dealt with all of these issues in her own life, from the death of her mother in giving birth and difficult childhood, to her intense relationship with Percy Shelley and her own pregnancy.

In introducing her, the Creature presents her as a complex character, outspoken and imaginative, and commands us to “hear her voice”. Indeed, even though they are not necessarily all direct quotes, the poems in the book are all told from Mary’s point of view, and Judge has pages of notes at the end identifying where she found individual lines. We hear Mary’s voice as shaped by Judge’s perceptions, choices, and words. Through Part 7, we get a relatively straightforward narrative of Mary’s life from childhood through the summer at the Villa Diodati, during which she started writing Frankenstein.  Part 8 starts with the suicides of her half-sister Fanny and Shelley’s wife Harriet and expresses her intense grief over their deaths and the early death of her first daughter in a nightmarish, Goya-esque collage of her internal turmoil, the responses of the very tangible Creature she creates, and the way the two of them are twisted together: he claiming “I am your creature,” and her return revelation, “My creature is me!”

This is not a light read. Mary Shelley’s life was intense, passionate, and difficult, and while Judge doesn’t go into the details, she doesn’t shy away from writing about sexual relationships, suicide, children dying, drug use, and bad reputation (as opposed to a recent children’s book that described Mary visiting the Villa Diodati with “her dear friend Percy Shelley”).  Judge omits any mention of Mary’s wedding to Shelley after Harriet’s suicide, which is, to me, a confusing thing to leave out, although I will grant that it wouldn’t have contributed well to the flow of Part 8, which is focused on Mary’s anger and grief (Judge explains her reasoning in an author’s note). In addition to an author’s note and the notes on the poems, Judge also provides additional information about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein following the book’s initial publication; thumbnail descriptions of the lives of major characters and family members, such as William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron; a list of books that Mary had read, according to her journal; and a bibilography. It’s not everything you want to know about Mary Shelley, but it’s a great place to start. Mary’s Monster is a breathtaking look at Mary Shelley’s younger years (Part 9 ends in 1823, and she lived until 1851), and, although it is targeted at YA audiences, I highly recommend it as a unique title that does an outstanding job of melding poetry, biography, art, and literary criticism into a powerful, magnetic, visually compelling, and well-researched story.

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on March 6, 2019 by , Reply

Women in Horror Fiction: What Would Mary Shelley Think?

Miniature of Mary Shelley Frankenstein author by Reginald Easton

 

Any time the topic of women in horror fiction comes up, someone almost immediately mentions Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. It’s a little frustrating to me because usually she’s the only one, or one of a very select few, whose names are repeated over and over, even though there are a wide variety of women writing horror. But I can certainly understand it. She wrote a novel that has resonated with countless individuals on many levels,  reimagined in a variety of media, with varying interpretations. Even people who don’t know who Mary Shelley is and have never read the book are familiar, in some way, with the Frankenstein story. It is that ingrained into our culture. It is an incredible accomplishment that a teenage girl not only had a terrifying vision– we all have nightmares at some point– but that she penned her story with such passion and horror that, if you can get past the clunky beginning, it stirs the reader’s emotions and twists at the heart. In her own words:

When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bound of reverie. I saw – with shut eyes, but acute mental vision – I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together; I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out; and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.

Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade – that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter, and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps, but he is awakened; he opens his eyes, behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes! I opened mine in terror.

The idea so possessed my mind that a thrill of terror ran through me…

I returned to my ghost story – my tiresome unlucky ghost story! O! if I could only contrive one which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened that night! Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. “I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.”

In The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein, Thomas and Dorothy Hoobler describe Mary’s life in great detail. At eighteen, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, not yet married to Shelley, was intimately familiar with the creation and destruction of life. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft died eleven days after she was born, an event which shaped the rest of her life.When her father remarried, she was displaced by a stepbrother. At sixteen, she had already run off with Percy Shelley, who was already married (although estranged from his pregnant wife). Before the summer of 1816, she had borne two children, the first of whom died before she had even been named. By the age of eighteen, Mary was very familiar with how easily life can slip away. Percy Shelley, unstable but brilliant, was fascinated with the supernatural and Gothic and also with science, interests that he did not seem to find at odds. Their companions during the “Haunted Summer” of 1816, Lord Byron and John Polidori, were similarly fascinated with both: Polidori, a medical doctor, also began the story that became the classic horror novel The Vampyre that summer. The idea that science, when bent to the manipulation of creating and animating (or, particularly, re-animating) life, could be as destructive and frightening as any supernatural force, was her nightmare, and she made it ours.

I, Frankenstein, yet another interpretation of the Frankenstein story, comes out in movie theaters this Friday. The reviews I’ve seen haven’t been great. Honestly, some of the other versions of the Frankenstein story that have appeared over the years have moved far away from the waking vision Mary Shelley had on a dark and stormy night. Whatever her other tragedies, and there were many in her life, her creation, and her Creature, has changed and grown, and whatever else it has become, there is no doubt that with her novel, she brought them to life. Would she look upon the many incarnations today the way that Victor Frankenstein did when he first saw his creation come to life? Would she be amazed by the tremendous impact a little novel she had to publish anonymously has had on the world?  What would Mary Shelley think of the way so many people have co-opted her “midnight spectre?”

Posted on February 18, 2014 by , Reply
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