In 1979, five months after my seventh birthday, my father crashed his plane into an orange grove and died. Dad, a pilot, had gone up in one of his twin-props with a friend and lost control after some sort of mechanical failure occurred in the skies above Central Florida.

The funeral was closed casket—an uncommon thing for Catholics back then—because my mother did not want people to see the work the undertakers had to do to stitch my father back together. So I never did get to say that last goodbye. Instead, I pondered what my father might have looked like in that shiny box and wondered if, even in a hideous form, he might ever be able to come back.

From that moment on, I gravitated toward stories about raising the dead—ghosts, vampires, any manner of gothic Victoriana. And it wasn’t long before I discovered Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Although many people focus on the idea of the “mad scientist” Frankenstein losing control of his monster, the real emotional and enduring truths of Shelley’s story lie deeper in the book, where grief uncomfortably resides. Victor Frankenstein grows obsessed with the idea of animating lifeless matter and assembles cadaverous body parts to form a humanlike creature that he electrifies into life. The sight of his creation immediately fills him with disgust, and he flees from the room in terror, rejecting this abomination completely. The rejection sends Frankenstein’s monster into a tailspin of isolation and misery. He becomes the novel’s instrument of death, murdering those near and dear to his creator.

Frankenstein is ultimately a story about an obsessive desire to conquer death. Shelley called the novel her “hideous progeny,” not simply because of the monster she had birthed but also because the story constantly assaults the reader with the horrendous effects of loss and grief, about which Shelley knew a great deal. She was just shy of 19 when she began writing her novel, and had already lost her own mother—as a result of complications from She