Books like Frankenstein
What should you read after Mary Shelley’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Mary Shelley
- 1818
- Gothic fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after Frankenstein
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchThe Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
A scientist who makes a second self and then cannot live with it, told through documents by people trying to understand what they saw. Shelley's structure, compressed to a hundred pages.
- Science as hubris
- A creator who abandons his creation
- Nested narrators inside each other
- Investigative, not confessional
Great matchDracula
Bram Stoker
The other pillar of the gothic, assembled from letters, diaries and clippings. Same period machinery, opposite creature: this one has no interest in being understood.
- Nested narrators inside each other
- Early nineteenth-century prose
- Loneliness as the real horror
- Long middle section drags
Best for the science-as-hubris themeThe Island of Dr. Moreau
Herbert George Wells
A man on an island making creatures out of animals and then failing to control what he has taught them. The clearest descendant of Victor's laboratory.
- Science as hubris
- A creator who abandons his creation
- The creature's own eloquent voice
- Vivisection described plainly
Great matchThe Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
Another man destroyed by something he brought into being and could not look at, with far better jokes on the way down.
- A creator who abandons his creation
- Revenge that consumes both of them
- Wit rather than dread
Best for the older version of the storyThe Golem
Elie Wiesel
The made man of Jewish tradition — created to protect, ending in ruin. The story Shelley's readers already knew when they opened her book.
- A creator who abandons his creation
- Science as hubris
- Folkloric, not novelistic
Great matchThe Invisible Man
Herbert George Wells
A scientist whose discovery isolates him completely and turns him cruel. Wells writing the loneliness half of Frankenstein rather than the creation half.
- Loneliness as the real horror
- Science as hubris
- The scientist is unsympathetic
Best for the creature's lonelinessThe Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka
A man wakes up unrecognisable and his family cannot bear to look at him. The rejection scene at the heart of Frankenstein, stretched to a whole book.
- Loneliness as the real horror
- The creature's own eloquent voice
- No plot in the usual sense
Worth a look — with a warningThe Call of Cthulhu
H. P. Lovecraft
Investigation assembled from documents into something that should not have been looked for. Lovecraft inherits Shelley's structure and drops her sympathy entirely.
- Nested narrators inside each other
- Science as hubris
- Lovecraft's racism is present
Best for the polar settingAt the Mountains of Madness
H. P. Lovecraft
An Antarctic expedition finds evidence of makers who made makers. If Walton's ice-bound frame was the part that gripped you, this is a whole novella of it.
- Arctic and alpine landscapes
- Science as hubris
- Long passages of pure description
Worth a look — with a warningWieland
Charles Brockden Brown
The first American gothic novel: a family destroyed by a voice they cannot account for. Genuinely of Shelley's period, and genuinely hard going.
- Early nineteenth-century prose
- Nested narrators inside each other
- Prose is more difficult than Shelley's
Worth a look — with a warningThe Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole
The book that invented the genre, and it shows — helmets fall from the sky and nobody blinks. Read it for the lineage rather than the fright.
- Early nineteenth-century prose
- Nested narrators inside each other
- Absurd by modern standards
Worth a look — with a warningMelmoth the Wanderer
Charles Maturin
A man who bargained for long life and roams looking for someone to take it off his hands, told in stories inside stories inside stories.
- Nested narrators inside each other
- Early nineteenth-century prose
- Loneliness as the real horror
- Enormous and digressive
Worth a look — with a warningThe Monk
Matthew Lewis
The lurid end of the gothic that Shelley's circle actually read: corruption, transgression, damnation, at speed. Startlingly explicit for 1796.
- Early nineteenth-century prose
- Revenge that consumes both of them
- Sexual violence and blasphemy
What should you read after Frankenstein?
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson — a scientist who makes a second self and then cannot live with it, told through documents by people trying to understand what they saw. Shelley's structure, compressed to a hundred pages.
If what stayed with you was nested narrators inside each other, read Dracula by Bram Stoker instead: the other pillar of the gothic, assembled from letters, diaries and clippings. Same period machinery, opposite creature: this one has no interest in being understood. The Island of Dr. Moreau by Herbert George Wells is the other strong option — a man on an island making creatures out of animals and then failing to control what he has taught them. The clearest descendant of Victor's laboratory.
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