Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Other Frankenstein | 2025 | Melissa F. Olson | Buy |
The Other Frankenstein was published in 2025 by Newcon Press and represents a significant departure from Melissa F. Olson’s paranormal fiction. Where her Old World novels work within genre conventions of urban fantasy, this book is closer to Gothic literary fiction, using Mary Shelley’s framework as a starting point rather than a template to follow. The two narrators are Elizabeth Frankenstein and Heck Saville, characters who exist in the original novel primarily in relation to Victor Frankenstein, and who here get their own full interior lives.
The novel is structured as an epistolary, meaning the story is told through first-person documents from each narrator, whose accounts run in parallel before intersecting. This format suits the material well: both women are dealing with circumstances largely outside their control, and the epistolary form gives each of them a private space that the men around them cannot access. Olson has described the book in interviews as concerned with empowerment and the way trauma shapes a person’s choices, themes that also run through her paranormal fiction but land differently here without the supernatural stakes.