Sheck, Laurie
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1953- ) US academic, poet and author, of sf interest primarily for her novel, A Monster's Notes (2009), in which the Frankenstein Monster, having been created – as Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) states – decades before the publication of the tale, visits Mary Shelley when she is still a small child. The interweaving of their relationship intimately affects the monster's life over the next century or so (he is apparently Immortal), as he attempts to understand the times he surveys through the blessing and curse of his outlier sensorium. The contemporary planet he traverses can be seen as torn by passions analogous to those aroused between the young woman and the transgressive being; warning notes about the fate of Homo sapiens are extractable from the tale. A thematic sequel, Island of the Mad (2016), follows its contemporary protagonist's quest for a forgotten book to an Island close to Venice, where he discovers hallucinatingly intense traces of two of the island's former inhabitants. Sheck's expressionist distortions of language and world seem married here, giving an effect far from the nonfantastic reading a "neutral" synopsis might suggest (see Fantastika). [JC]
Laurie Sheck
born New York: 10 July 1953
works
- A Monster's Notes (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2009) [hb/]
- Island of the Mad (New York: Counterpoint, 2016) [hb/]
collections (highly selected)
- Amaranth (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1981) [poetry: coll: chap: hb/nonpictorial]
links
previous versions of this entry