Frankenstein, Karloff, and Spike the Mutant

“I was euphoric in June. Look where we are now.” So begins a new essay in the New York Times that considers how the summer we hoped for got preempted by Covid-Delta. That’s the thing with monsters. You can never be sure they’re gone for good.

Cartoon by Dana Summers, Copyright 2021 Tribune Content Agency, from The Week .

Take the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. He ends the 1818 novel by promising to vanish forever, but then – after leaping onto an ice floe in the frozen north, he returns...