Why I wrote MONSTER

Sometimes an idea will pop into your head that just won't leave you alone. That's what happened to me when I had the idea of writing a retelling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein where everything a dying Victor Frankenstein told Captain Walton aboard the icebound ship was a lie to protect his reputation, and the monster now gets to tell the real story. A year later this idea continued to nag at me, and after another year of reading about thirty books for research this idea had turned into a story that I wanted to write. In my version, Victor Frankenstein would be in league with the Marquis de Sade to bring hell to earth, and the monster remain a tragic, albeit heroic, figure. Thematically the book would be about the corrosive quality of vengeance, as well as a repudiation of de Sade's central theme of man being little more than a base animal. While I knew there were many readers who consider Shelley's great novel a sacred tome and would look at any retelling as blasphemy, at this point this was a novel that was burning too deeply inside and was one I had to write.