For the Guardian, Neil Gaiman discusses the import of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, suggesting that the book arrived and redefined gothic fiction at a culturally apt moment:
Ideas happen when the time is right for them. The ground had been prepared. Gothic fiction had been all the rage for some time: dark, driven men had wandered the corridors of their ancestral homes, finding secret passages and dead relatives, magical, miserable, occasionally immortal; while the questing urge of science had discovered that frogs could twitch and spasm, after death, when current was applied, and, in an era of change, so much more was waiting to be discovered.
