Free Harry Potter's Bookshelf by John Granger

The Modern Prometheus (1818), or at least thinks they do. The popular version goes something like this: A mad scientist-doctor in a castle on the hill with a hunchbacked assistant and mega-gigawatts of voltage, reanimates a giant sewn together from the parts of corpses. The giant goes on a killing spree before the doctor and villagers hunt him down.
    Fortunately, this story isn’t the one written by Mary Shelley. Her story is about a young scientist who discovers a way to create life. No castle, no hunchback, no lightning, just an unnamed monstrous giant. The ugliness of his creation causes the doctor to have a breakdown that lasts several months. Sadly, when he recovers, he learns that his younger brother has been murdered. He returns home, and, on a mountaintop, has a heart-to-heart with the monster who wants a bride. So Dr. Frankenstein heads back to the graveyard for monster-fiancée parts. Just before reanimating the stitched-together giantess, though, the scientist has a change of heart and reneges on his promised monster-bride. The monster, not pleased, has his revenge by killing Dr. Frankenstein’s bride on their wedding day, as well as the doctor’s friend. Dr. Frankenstein chases the monster toward the North Pole and expires on an arctic exploration ship trapped in the ice after telling the tale to the ship’s captain. The monster says his pathetic good-bye, incredibly, in the ship’s cabin, and escapes after a soliloquy promising his self-destruction.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
    Gothic takes something of a holiday (with the exception of Dickens and Collins, whose latter books are gothic melodramas) until its dramatic reemergence in the late Victorian fin de siècle horror stories made popular by Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Here the gentleman scientist Dr. Henry Jekyll, “committed to a profound duplicity of life,” discovers a drug that “so potently controlled and shook the very fortress of identity” that it freed him from “certain of the powers that made up my spirit.” Dr. Jekyll, with one draught, in other words, could become an ensouled body sans conscience and spirit, by name “Edward Hyde,” and with another, revert to the man of body, soul, and spirit, Dr. Jekyll.
    Mr. Hyde, though, as you’d expect, is more demon than human being. His crimes touch Dr. Jekyll’s conscience but do not turn him to a path of abstinence or regret; Hyde’s crimes to Jekyll are only Hyde’s and he only makes those amends he thinks prudent.
    To Jekyll’s distress, however, the transformations to Hyde begin to happen spontaneously and are more difficult to reverse. Jekyll the gentleman realizes that Hyde is now the master of his person. Hyde murders a member of Parliament, Jekyll locks himself in his laboratory, the key ingredient in the draughts is lost, and Jekyll-Hyde commits suicide.
Dracula
    In Bram Stoker’s Dracula , Dr. Abraham Van Helsing is called in to combat the Dark Lord. He leads a group of men across London and eventually Europe to destroy Count Dracula. Dracula seduces Mina Harker and gains control of her mind by forcing her to drink his blood. But this mind-link between Mina and Dracula enables Van Helsing to track the count all the way to Transylvania. In a move to protect Mina from Dracula’s summoning and influence, Van Helsing places a Communion wafer on her forehead, but it burns her flesh. Mina cries, “Unclean! Unclean! Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh! I must bear this mark of shame upon my forehead until the Judgment Day!” (chapter twenty-two). When Dracula is destroyed, her scar disappears.
And More
    Had enough? How about Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart?” In one of the most tightly crafted pieces of horror put to page, Poe’s narrator relates his murder of an old man because he couldn’t stand the man’s “vulture” eye, his “pale blue eye,” that made his blood run cold.