When Mary Shelley's Frankenstein created his creature, he gave birth to a being with a thirst for knowledge, a need for love and a desire, eventually, to kill. Hubris on the part of the inventor prompted a desire for vengeance as a newly created man rebelled against his god. In an age of technology in which man took pride in his accomplishments, Shelley issued a warning against those guilty of over-reaching, who imagined themselves masters of their universe with a presumptive right to command. And the revenge, when it came, began with the killing of a child and then continued with sexual violation and a relentless pursuit.

Frankenstein was what Northrop Frye called a precursor of the existential thriller in that it was about the desire to understand the purpose of being. As the creature asks, ‘Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? In his introduction to an edition of the novel, Maurice Hindle recalls the second-century gnostic Clement of Alexandria as saying, ‘what liberates is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, where into we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what birth is, and what rebirth’. The subtitle of Frankenstein is The Modern Prometheus, Prometheus, in Greek, being the creator of life. The book has an epigraph from Milton's Paradise Lost, a book the creature would read:

1. Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

2. To mould me Man, did I solicit thee

3. From darkness to promote me