Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

 

It turns out this was published less than a hundred years after what (best I can tell) are considered to be the earliest English-language novels, and the fact that "novel" wasn't entirely an established form, yet (outside of length) shows. What kept kicking me out, though wasn't the two-hundred-year-old novel-quirks; it was the two-hundred-year-old science. Shelley at least has the ... presence of mind, I guess, to keep the actual mechanics of Victor's work obscured--and his determination that his secrets should die with him is a reasonable enough plot point. The structure, with at least three layers of nested narrative, is one that occasionally surfaces today, in novels as different from each other as *Cloud Atlas* and *The Buffalo Hunter Hunter*, though Shelley doesn't seem to even try (or feel expected to) muster the shifts in narrative register Stephen Graham Jones handles so gracefully in the latter. Some of the ... contrivances in the story are wacky and almost laughable; there's often not a lot of difference in prosody between narration and dialogue, let alone difference in character voice; the epistolary nature kinda clunks along, as it tends to, managing little more than to frame the first-person narratives. It still has some kick, though, and the thematics of it pack some punch; it's clear why it lingers in the cultural subconscious (though most of that's probably due at least as much to James Whale and Boris Karloff as it is to Mary Shelley).