Books like Frankenstein

Robert Louis Stevenson published The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886, and it stands alongside Frankenstein as one of the foundational texts of horror fiction. Both novels ask what happens when a scientist tampers with forces he does not fully understand. Both create monsters that reflect their creators' worst impulses. And both use their horror to say something about the society that produced them.

Jekyll is a respectable Victorian doctor who develops a potion that separates his good and evil natures into two distinct bodies. Hyde, the evil half, is smaller, younger, and described by everyone who sees him as physically repulsive in a way no one can quite articulate. Stevenson understood that evil is not dramatic or glamorous. It is petty and cruel and enjoys causing pain for its own sake.

The novella's investigation structure gives it a momentum that Frankenstein's nested narratives do not always provide. Utterson, the lawyer protagonist, pieces together the truth through witness accounts and documents, building a case against something he cannot name. Where Victor Frankenstein creates a monster and runs from it, Jekyll creates a monster and becomes it. Both stories end the same way: with the creator destroyed by what he made.

H.G. Wells published The Island of Doctor Moreau in 1896, and it reads like Frankenstein relocated to a tropical island and stripped of all restraint. Edward Prendick, shipwrecked and rescued, finds himself on an island where Dr. Moreau conducts vivisection experiments on animals, surgically reshaping them into approximations of human beings.

The Beast Folk walk upright, speak in broken sentences, and follow a set of laws designed to keep their animal natures in check. Wells takes Shelley's central question and pushes it further. Victor Frankenstein creates one creature and is horrified. Moreau creates an entire society and sees nothing wrong with it. The novel is about the arrogance of the scientific mind taken to its logical extreme, about a man who believes his intelligence gives him the right to reshape life according to his vision.

The Beast Folk are pitiful and terrifying in equal measure, creatures caught between two natures, belonging to neither. Wells writes with a clinical precision that makes the violence feel more disturbing. There is no Gothic atmosphere to soften the edges. The Island of Doctor Moreau presents creation as an act of cruelty, performed without anesthesia on subjects who cannot consent. It is Frankenstein without the sympathy.

Philip K. Dick published Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in 1968, and it transplants Frankenstein's central dilemma into a science fiction setting. In a post-nuclear San Francisco, bounty hunter Rick Deckard tracks down and retires rogue androids who are nearly indistinguishable from humans. The androids are created to serve as slave labor on off-world colonies.

When they escape, they are hunted. Dick asks the same question Shelley asked: if you create something that can think and feel, what do you owe it? Deckard uses an empathy test to distinguish androids from humans, but the test becomes increasingly unreliable as the novel progresses. Some androids seem more empathetic than the humans hunting them. Dick was writing about the Vietnam War era, about a society that dehumanized certain people to justify violence against them.

The parallels to Frankenstein's creature, rejected solely for being different, are direct. Dick's prose is rougher than Shelley's, more paranoid, more interested in the gap between reality and perception. But the emotional core is the same: a created being asking why it was made if it was only going to be destroyed. The novel is short, feverish, and deeply uncomfortable in the best way.

Jeff VanderMeer published Annihilation in 2014, and it approaches Frankenstein's themes from the opposite direction. Instead of a scientist creating something unnatural, Annihilation drops four unnamed women into Area X, a stretch of American coastline where nature itself has become the creator, reshaping everything it touches according to rules no one understands. The biologist narrator enters a structure called the Tower, which grows downward into the earth, its walls covered in words written by a living organism. Annihilation shares Frankenstein's obsession with the boundary between the natural and the unnatural, but VanderMeer inverts the power dynamic.

In Shelley's novel, a human plays god and pays for it. In Annihilation, something inhuman is playing god with humans, and the results are equally horrifying. The biologist's scientific training becomes both her greatest asset and her greatest liability. She can observe what is happening to her, categorize it, name it.

But naming something does not give you power over it. VanderMeer writes in tight, controlled prose that mirrors the biologist's attempt to stay rational in the face of the irrational. The novel is slim, under two hundred pages, and every sentence carries weight.

Kiersten White published The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein in 2018, and it takes Shelley's novel apart and reassembles it from Elizabeth Lavenza's point of view. In Shelley's original, Elizabeth is Victor's adopted sister and eventual bride, a figure of pure virtue who exists mainly to die and motivate Victor's guilt. White gives her agency, intelligence, and a survival instinct forged by a childhood in poverty. Elizabeth knows Victor is dangerous.

She has always known. But she has nowhere else to go, and so she manages him, redirects his obsessions, and holds the household together through sheer force of will. White's retelling works because it does not simply flip the hero and villain. Victor is still brilliant and still obsessed, but seen through Elizabeth's eyes, his genius looks more like pathology.

The creature's creation is reframed as the inevitable result of a man no one ever told no. White writes with a Gothic intensity that honors Shelley's original while updating its gender politics. Elizabeth's voice is sharp, pragmatic, and increasingly desperate as she realizes that managing Victor was never going to be enough to contain what he made.

Susanna Clarke published Piranesi in 2020, and it shares Frankenstein's fascination with solitude, creation, and the search for meaning in a world that was not made for you. Piranesi lives alone in a vast House filled with thousands of halls, each containing classical statues. The ocean floods the lower halls. Clouds form in the upper ones. Piranesi catalogs everything with the devotion of a scientist, mapping the tides, naming the statues, caring for the bones of the dead who came before him.

He has no memory of any other life. Clarke builds the mystery of the House with the patience of a watchmaker. Who built it? Why does Piranesi not remember his past? What does the Other, the only other living person he meets, want from him?

The answers connect to themes Shelley would recognize: the ethics of using knowledge to reshape reality, the loneliness of being the only one of your kind, and the question of whether a created world can become more real than the world that created it. Piranesi's innocence echoes the creature's early chapters in Frankenstein, when it learned about the world with wonder before the world taught it cruelty. Clarke's novel finds a gentler ending, but the emotional territory is the same.

Daniel Keyes published Flowers for Algernon as a short story in 1959 and expanded it into a novel in 1966. Charlie Gordon is a thirty-two-year-old man with an IQ of 68 who works as a janitor and attends classes at a school for adults with intellectual disabilities. He volunteers for an experimental surgery that has already tripled the intelligence of a laboratory mouse named Algernon. The surgery works. Charlie's intelligence soars past genius level.

And then Algernon begins to deteriorate. Keyes tells the entire story through Charlie's progress reports, and the writing style changes as Charlie's intelligence grows and then declines. The early entries are misspelled and simple. The middle entries are sophisticated and analytical. The final entries break your heart.

The connection to Frankenstein runs deep. Charlie is a created being in the same sense as the creature: reshaped by science, given capacities he did not ask for, and ultimately abandoned when the experiment fails. Both stories ask what scientists owe the subjects of their work. Both end with the created being alone, carrying knowledge that isolates rather than connects. Keyes wrote one of the most emotionally devastating science fiction novels ever published, and its questions about intelligence, empathy, and human worth have not gotten easier to answer.