Paul Ruditis's Frankenstein Lives: The Legacy of the World's Most Famous Monster is, in some ways, just another Franken-survey. It's certainly less ambitious than, say, the late great David Skal's fascinating yet meandering Screams of Reason or Susan Tyler Hitchcock's more focused and definitive Frankenstein: A Cultural History. But Ruditis surely didn't intend his 161-page Frankenstein Lives to be definitive. Its purpose may be to be the most concise yet satisfying one, as well as the most up-to-date, as it folds such recent items as Poor Things and Lisa Frankenstein into the discussion.
Ruditis's book is also, in essence, the tale of an evolution, of how Mary Shelley may have given birth to a monster, but it took playwright Peggy Webling to give it the name most of us use to identify it, Jack Pierce and James Whale to give him a face, and others to highlight how the monster is capable of just about anything, from serving as the sexually self-actualizing she-monster of Poor Things to the Cher-obsessed doofus of that X-Files episode to the stitched-up beloved family pet of Frankenweenie to a plastic Aurora model to the strawberry sweetheart of breakfast tables. Ruditis really drives home how the Frankenstein monster has changed in a way that might not have been as crisply defined in a longer book.
Like all the best Franken-product, Frankenstein Lives is also wonderful to look at. It's loaded with images of Karloff, Lee, Gwynne, Boyle, Stone and the rest in their monster guises, as well as shots of monstrous Ben Cooper Halloween costumes, comics, and Legos certain to stir warm feelings within those who adore that cold slab of undead flesh.
