Letters from the Ice

Frankenstein does not open with a laboratory. It opens with a lonely man's letters home from the edge of the map, and Charlotte Gordon reads those four letters as the whole novel in miniature. Robert Walton wants glory and an audience; his sister Margaret never gets a voice, and Gordon finds a real, drowned ghost behind her silence. By the time a stranger comes off the ice claiming a double existence, the book has taught you its real game: doubles all the way up, and a story that keeps showing you its own seams.