Dave Morris, Frankenstein (Profile Books & Inkle Studios, 2012).

In criticism on Frankenstein and its adaptations, it has become a commonplace to note the aptness of Mary Shelley’s grotesquely composed creature for figuring cultural production; this trope of the creature as a self-reflexive embodiment of intertextuality also informs the novel’s continuing pedagogical popularity, and even some adaptations themselves, especially self-consciously “new media” adaptations, like Shelley Jackson’s 1995 hypertext fiction, Patchwork Girl. The Frankenstein “app” – an “interactive fiction” (IF) adaptation published last year by Dave Morris – is no exception. “This thing you’re holding … is a book – there’s no need for traditionalists to be scared of it,” writes Morris, in the Acknowledgments. “The digital world isn’t full of monsters, honest.” But what kind of book, or thing, is this Frankenstein interactive fiction, created specifically for iOS (Apple’s mobile device operating system)?

Morris’ Frankenstein is mainly an adaptation, but it is also an edition. The edition appears among the app’s auxiliary “Extras”: its acknowledgments and credits, a gallery of the period art used to illustrate Morris’ adaptation, and a section called “the Original Frankenstein.” This section reprints the 1818 edition text (but only identifies it as such in the App Store description in the app itself, “Original” implies the edition used). This edition is presented in full, but not annotated, and with some minor textual errors (e.g. the Preface is missing, as is Walton’s valediction at the end of Letter 3). Nevertheless, the 1818 edition’s inclusion here nicely complements Morris’ adaptation, which in tone and theme has more in common with the fatalism of Shelley’s 1831 revision.

The app’s main event, then, is Morris’ adaptation -opened by the “Read” prompt you’re first shown – which unfolds through reader prompts, much like the “Choose your own adventure” kids’ books of the 1980s. You read a passage, and as you scroll to its end, a tab or tabs appear, as prompts for you to select what happens next. While interactive fiction traditionally solicits user input as typing, here it is reduced to tapping – in the context of the IF genre, this text is more tale than game, more literary than problem-solving. For instance, early in the first chapter, Victor Frankenstein – whose indeterminate, second-person interlocutor “you” are as the reader – asks if you’d like to take a shortcut or the scenic route to his lodgings. You’re then shown two prompts: “The short cut is fine” and “By all means let’s see the sights.” Which prompt you tap, then, directs how the plot progresses. Some of the self-reflexive figuring of the story itself as a grotesque collage happens in the visual design applied to this interactive reading interface: each passage is shown as a bit of typed parchment against a “wallpaper” of ink-stained wood and anatomical drawings, and each new passage you call up is pinned to the last. So you not only direct but fix the story as you read; the app only lets you reset each chapter or the whole book after you’ve read through the whole thing once. This fixity can be frustrating, if you tap the wrong prompt by mistake or are just curious to see how different paths branch out; but, on the other hand, this fixity lets you review not just what you’ve read but how you’ve constructed your reading, and it reinforces in form the fatalism of Morris’ variation on Shelley’s theme.

The adaptation is frustratingly fixed in another way: for both the reader acquainted with Shelley’s original and the reader at home in the game-worlds of IF, the interactivity of Morris’ fiction soon comes to seem more ornamental than substantial. Many prompts are more detail – or setting-oriented than plot-oriented; if you deliberately select prompts that seem to substantially revise or redirect the plot of the original novel (as I did in multiple re-readings), you soon find the story being steered back to the inexorable course it charts through the major scenes of the original novel’s plot: the creature’s tutelage by and alienation from the DeLacy family, William’s murder and Justine’s framing, Victor’s Scottish abortion and Irish incarceration, his doomed wedding night, the arctic encounter with Walton. However, the firmly directed drift of the narrative towards the original novel’s fabula amplifies this adaptation’s fatalistic tone, and leave you to take a more active interest in its syuzhet, in the creative liberties Morris takes in rearticulating the bones of Shelley’s story.

Notable immediately is the absence of the original novel’s frame tale and its successively nested first-person narratives. You are introduced right away to the doctor, and not long after shown his monster, all in the first of the book’s six parts. Part Two reprises the monster’s awakening, and here Morris uses IF’s second-person present tense to wonderfully clever advantage: it positions you, the reader, as the monster, in its growth from bewilderment to enlightenment. The monster does confront his maker with this tale, but not until “you” experience it first. IF’s prevailing second-person, present tense narrative mode thus works here to both fascinate and frustrate: who “you” are is never made explicit – sometimes you read as if “you” are the monster, other times as an unknown interlocutor, perhaps an unnamed acquaintance, perhaps a voice inside Victor’s harried and haunted head, or perhaps the ship captain, Walton. However, the text ultimately rules out the latter possibility: Walton (in the third-person) makes a very late and brief appearance in the very last chapters, where the drastically different plotting of his role tends to muddle the tale (in contrast to how his implied presence throughout the original helps it to cohere).

Some of the altered and adapted details make for similar narrative disjunctions, while others present suggestive interpretive possibilities. Some prompts make the dialogue between you and Victor, or between Victor and the creature, seem discontinuous, or punctuated by non sequitur. Alternately, the option to help Victor select a woman’s head for the original creature, not its “bride,” enables an incidental but vivid queer re-reading. More intriguing, fully realized, and pedagogically useful is Morris’ change of Frankenstein‘s setting and primal scene: he moves the “workshop of filthy creation” not only from Shelley’s fourth chapter to his version’s first, but also from Ingolstadt to revolutionary Paris. This shift entails the introduction of numerous period details throughout the text, such as Robespierre’s execution, as the passage of narrative time moves from the revolution’s “year one,” through the Terror to the counter-revolution. What is pedagogically useful in this change of scene is how it spells out some of the more deeply coded political subtext of the original in a way students new to the work can more readily identify and work to interpret. “In overturning the old injustices,” Victor tells you, “the revolutionaries have created a monstrous form of government.”

Morris’ work shows extensive research of Romantic period history and intensive study of both of Shelley’s text and of her writing style, on which he draws, and which he samples liberally, but which he does not imitate, adopting a plainer, more contemporary vocabulary and syntax, though laced with period expressions. This style sometimes lapses into cliché, or comes across as perfunctory in propelling the plot, but as often yields lyrical prose interludes, as in the visceral, synaesthetic account of the creature’s awakening in the first chapter of Part Two. Borrowing samples verbatim from the source text, Morris remixes these for his own stylistic purposes, preserving some of Shelley’s most memorable images, especially those of electric power. The “workshop of filthy creation” and “darkness and distance” images provide chapter titles; in his narrative, Victor recalls the tree destroyed by lightning, and, in Ireland, asks “of what materials am I made, that I can thus resist so many shocks?” The creature likewise keeps some of its most memorable lines, such as its self-description as an “instrument of future mischief.”

As has been said of prior adaptations of Frankenstein, Morris’ version adapts not only Shelley’s work itself but other prior adaptations. Jackson is a clear precursor here, but Morris also gestures to film adaptations, such as the Hammer studio series; he gives an arch nod to Blade Runner too. As such, Morris’ Frankenstein should interest scholars of adaptation studies and new media, as well as film and gaming fans. In its plainspoken but period-stylized readability, its pairing of IF adaptation and original edition, its optimization of iOS affordances (especially intuitive navigation and rich graphic design), and value for price, this Frankenstein app also makes a very teachable text. If students exposed first to monster movies have tended, on first reading Shelley’s novel, to be surprised by the creature’s eloquence, those introduced to Frankenstein via Morris’ version might be more surprised by Walton’s prominence in the original. And the IF milieu, with its distinctively solicitous and self-reflexive narrative mode, can equip students to better read for literary figure, to critically reflect on the relations between form and content, which new media Frankensteins perennially represent as relays between medium and monster.