Frankenstein

Victor Frankenstein builds a living man out of dead material, looks at what he has made, and runs. Everything after that comes from the running away rather than from the experiment.

The creature teaches himself to speak by watching a family through a gap in a wall, works out exactly what was done to him, and comes back with an argument. He wants a companion. He is refused. Mary Shelley was eighteen when she began it, during a wet summer on Lake Geneva where Byron had proposed that the household write ghost stories, and she handed her monster the better half of every debate in the book. Two versions circulate, by the way. The 1831 revision is markedly more fatalistic than the 1818 original, and the difference is not cosmetic.

Available edition: text of Project Gutenberg eBook #84. The cover is an original BDeBooks design. The PDF has 189 pages; the EPUB is reflowable. Project Gutenberg credits and license are kept.