URBAN FANTASY GOTHIC REVIEW: The Monsters Wife - Kate Horsley

Release Date: 18/09/14
Publisher:  Barbican

SYNOPSIS:

A startling new sequel to Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein. Told from the perspective of the girl Victor Frankenstein transformed into a Bride for his monster.

To a tiny island in the Scottish Orkneys, peopled by a devout community of twenty, comes Victor Frankenstein, driven there by a Devil's bargain: to make a wife for the Creature who is stalking him across Europe. In this darkly-wrought answer to Frankenstein, we hear the untold tale of the monster's wife through the perspective of the doctor's housemaid. Oona works below stairs with her best friend May, washing the doctor's linens and keeping the fires lit at the Big House. An orphan whose only legacy is the illness that killed her mother, Oona knows she is doomed. But she is also thirsty for knowledge, determined to know life fully before it slips away. As tensions heighten between Victor and the islanders, Oona becomes the doctor's trusted accomplice, aiding in secret experiments and seeing horrors she sometimes wishes to forget. When May disappears, Oona must face up to growing suspicions about the enigmatic employer to whom she has grown close - but the truth is darker than anything she could imagine.

A literary gothic, in the tradition of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly.


REVIEW:

There are so many things that you can say about this book and to be honest its been very hard to writing a review, not because the book is bad, far from it but because the book has a lot happening in it and to be honest it has to be one of my highlights of the year.

The writing is not only crisp but keeps you glued, the prose is wonderfully inviting and when added to a solid pace all round makes this a title that is hard to put down. Add to this characters that you can’t wait to spend time around alongside an overall arc that really does keep you gripped to the last page. Its definitely a cracking title and if you don’t pick up any other gothic book this year, make sure its this one. Absolutely corking.