Frankenstein (1818 version) by Mary Shelley

When the scientist Victor Frankenstein attempts to create life in his laboratory, he sets in motion tragic forces beyond his control and faces the loss of everything he loves. Mary Shelley’s original book—with its mythic-minded hero and highly sympathetic monster, who reads Goethe and longs to be at peace with himself—far surpasses the countless adaptations, imitations, and homages which followed. Written at the instigation of Lord Byron and published in 1818, the teenaged Shelley's first novel blends elements of gothic dread and the English romantic tradition, which it at once exemplifies and critiques. (Penguin is releasing a new edition of the 1818 text—tied to the Guillermo Del Toro movie coming out this fall and with an introduction by the English novelist Jeanette Winterson—on September 30.)