But Angelika is a romance heroine, not a horror villain, and I wish I’d had a better sense that both her, and the book as a whole, understood that re-shaping someone, then forcing them to live as your dependent in mental and physical torment (Will is explicitly in pain the whole book and his recovery of self-agency is represented largely by gardening) isn’t all that cute, no matter how disenfranchised or unloved you feel. He is not a new person like Dr Frankenstein’s creation in the original text or Frank-N-Furter’s Rocky.

I staying up late to finish the novel, which features a new character, Victor Frankenstein's brilliant sister and partner in scientific experimentation, Angelika.

Even the possibility that Will could have been engaged before he died only caused a tiny sliver of guilt as she continued to pursue his affections. Angelika successfully brings back the perfect man, who she names Will and hopes will fall in love with her as quickly as she fell in love with him (before he even took his first breath). So they are building her one, because he’ll be so grateful she brought him back to life, saved him, that he’ll fall in love with her instantly. Whilst she could not find anything overly objectionable in her reflection, and she had indeed been described many times as a beauty, there was something about her personality that was untenable.

Filled with carriages, candlesticks, and corpses, Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match is the spooky-season reimagining of the well-known classic that reminds us to never judge a man by his cadaver! The banter is world-class, and I caught myself laughing out loud and staying up far too late to read just one more page. Obvs they’re all good changes, but the fact that she clung so tightly to her brother after their parents died and so much of her personality and achievements are based off of their sibling relationship and camaraderie to THEN clinging herself to Will so tightly and seeing all these rapid fire changes? In AFMHM, Angelika’s complicity in choices that objectify, dehumanise, and disempower her love interest is mostly … played for laughs?Honestly that alone should’ve probably been a clue, that such a new release was so readily available, from an author that had previously produced such a popular book.