A Monster’s Notes
By Laurie Sheck
Cover design by Peter Mendelsund
Knopf, 2009

A single eye looks out from the cover of A Monster’s Notes, in which Laurie Sheck has reimagined Frankenstein for our time. Designer Peter Mendelsund found the eye in a 19th-century anatomical textbook.

Taking his cue from Victor Frankenstein, he at first created a monster from various parts, adding to the eye scraps of Mary Shelley’s manuscript pages and an image from the book’s original frontispiece, to construct a face on a black background. Then he began to simplify by removing elements. He chose a softer, fleshlike background colour, enlarged the eye and made it the cover’s sole pictorial element. The focus on the eye recalls the moment in Shelley’s novel when Dr. Frankenstein first meets the gaze of the creature he has galvanised into life: “I beheld the wretch – the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me.”

In Sheck’s brilliant revision, the monster appears to Mary Shelley when she is very young, sitting by her mother’s tomb. He often reads to her, needing “to calm himself with books”, and the two form a lifelong bond, though they never speak. The story moves by way of fictionalised letters written by Mary Shelley, her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, and others in her circle. These are interspersed with entries from the monster’s notebook as he wanders from the Arctic to New York City, from the 18th century to the present day, questioning his creators and making notes. Juxtapositions abound, and the effect of the whole is a profound meditation on isolation and grief, language and silence, the desire for connection and solace.

For Mendelsund, the eye is “the most human part of our anatomy”. And in A Monster’s Notes it is the monster’s subjectivity, his human gaze upon the world that rejects his deformed body, which is the most tragic, powerful element of his story.