Remarkably, a nineteen-year-old, writing her first novel, penned a tale that combines tragedy, morality, social commentary, and a thoughtful examination of the very nature of knowledge, writes best-selling author Leslie S. Klinger. Yet Mary Shelleys Frankenstein is often reductively dismissed as a tacky monster film or a cautionary tale about experimental science gone haywire. Now, Klinger does for Shelleys story of early nineteenth-century horror what he did for Sherlock Holmes, Dracula and H. P. Lovecraft, bringing this gothic tale to nightmarish life by reproducing the original text with the most lavishly illustrated and comprehensively annotated edition to date. For the first time, The New Annotated Frankenstein brilliantly accounts for variations between the 1818 and the 1831 versions of the text and includes an introduction by the director of Pans Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro, and an afterword by feminist scholar Anne K. Mellor.