Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

The emotional centre of Shelley's masterwork belongs to the creature's own narrative in the Alpine ice caves. Here we witness a newly animated nervous system struggling to interpret radiant warmth, blinding light, hunger and language. His early woodland existence unfolds with exquisite sensory delicacy before the bitter reality of human disgust twists his yearning into fury. Experiencing the world through his immense, unwieldy physiology and his unreciprocated tenderness completely inverts the horror story, transforming the so-called monster into the book's most perceptive moral critic.