The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein
Peter Ackroyd
Victor Frankenstein begins his anatomy experiments in a barn in the secluded village of Headington, near Oxford. The coroner's office provides the corpses he needs - but they have often died by violent means and are damaged and putrifying. Victor moves his coils and jars and electrical fluids to a deserted pottery manufactury in Limehouse. And, from Limehouse, makes contact with the Doomesday Men - the resurrectionists.
Victor pays better than any hospital for the bodies of the very recently dead. Even so, perfect specimens are hard to come by... until that Thames-side dawn when Victor, waiting, wrapped in his greatcoat, on his wooden jetty, hears the splashing of oars and sees in the half-light that slung into the stern of the approaching boat is the corpse of a handsome young man, one hand trailing in the water....
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About Peter Ackroyd
Reviews for The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein
Daily Express
A brilliant jeu d'esprit. Above all, it stands as a tribute to the power of the human imagination
Daily Telegraph
Ackroyd takes Mary Shelley's hint of a doppelganger and plays with it fascinatingly in a fast-paced thriller which also nods towards the notion of split personality enshrined in Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde... The novel leaps to its climax nimbly as a pursuing fiend, adn ends suitably in fiery revelation
Michele Roberts
Independent
Distinguished Frankensteinian fantasia...Ackroyd loves taking what we, the general reading public, think we know about great writers, only to twist that knowledge into new fictional shapes....Ackroyd is the great pretzel-baker of contemporary fiction. And this is one of his tastiest, and twistiest, products so far
Financial Times
Terrifying and fascinating in equal measure
The Times