Robert J. Myers - The Cross Of Frankenstein

[dem bones]

Robert J. Myers - The Cross Of Frankenstein (Sphere, 1977)

Alan Lee

Blurb:
FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER LIVES!
High in the brooding mountains of America the grotesque monster created by Dr Frankenstein hides away, nursing a terrible wound which is draining his life's blood.
The only person who can save him is Dr Frankenstein's son, Victor. Only he knows the secret of the fluid that courses through the monster's veins.
Lured to the monster's lair, Victor is thrown into a vortex of terror and intrigue as he comes face to face with his father's foul creation and tries to thwart the monster's dreadful plans for humanity .. .

Robert J. Myers brilliantly continues the compelling legend of the Frankenstein monster in this gripping story of nightmarish terror and suspense.

Robert J. Myers - The Slave Of Frankenstein (Sphere, 1977)

Blurb:
A FIEND STALKS THE HEART OF AMERICA!

The hideous monster created by Baron Frankenstein still lives - and in the swampy lowlands of Virginia he is putting a grisly plan into action.
Aided by unscrupulous men, he is creating an entire race of zombie-like creatures ‑ monsters of his own kind - and his victims are slaves stolen from the Southern plantations!

Frankenstein's son,Victor, has sworn to rid the world of this foul abomination. But the Monster has other plans for him. He needs Victor's skills if he is to achieve his power-crazed ambitions. And if Victor refuses to comply the Monster has promised to kill his beautiful, beloved daughter...

In the second of Robert J. Myers's chilling stories of Frankenstein's Monster, Victor's battle to destroy his father's nightmarish creation, begun in The Cross Of Frankenstein, moves heart- stoppingly towards its horrific climax.

I fell kind of guilty about neglecting Robert J. Myers and his short-lived Frankenstein series. After a number of false-starts, i'm still no nearer to completing either book and you know who's putting me off? Donald bleedin' Glut, that's who! I got such a thrill from his peerless camp lunacy of his New Adventures .... series - the thread devoted to same on Vault MK. I still strikes me as one of our most exuberant - that Mr. Myers' slightly more sober approach left me a bit cold. Where's Boring Burt Winslow and his "superb brain"? Where's the frequently captured lovely Lynn Powell (uniforms a speciality)and those faceless fiends from the mighty O.G.R.E.? Even cover artwork inspired by Kate O'Mara's scheming servant from Horror Of Frankenstein barely boosts morale. Anyone fared any better with these? Should i bump 'em up the too read pile?

[andydecker]

I bought Slave after reading a review on Groovy Age and getting it cheap. Two or three years later I put it Saturday from one shelf to another. I just couldn´t work up the interest to read it.

After reading the new PF I ordered James´/Harveys The Cut and James´ The Farm and The City. It never stops

[killercrab]

Same here with Slave - dunno what it is - but I just never break it out. Cover's fun though. Farm and the City - pigs amok! - I hope to snag these one day - the most bloody cover ever maybe?

KC

[dem bones]

Not read The Farm, but i can vouch for the sheer brilliance of The City - bollock-eating pigs on the rampage in the old Wembley Stadium! Also, quite probably, the only reference to the Fall's lo-fi toe-tapper Eat Y'self Fitter in a 'When Animals Attack' nasty.

I forgot we'd actually had a bit of a go at Myers' mini-series at the old place, Another Frankenstein. Eleven posts and still little or nothing about either Slave .. or Cross ... I'm starting to fell quite sorry for them. Pocket Books published another Myers novel, the "sexually explicit" Virgin And The Vampire the same year, but that doesn't sound all that riveting either. According to Greg Cox: " ... not, sadly, a terribly interesting book .....reminds one of the tedious excesses of Varney The Vampyre ... worst of all is the shock ending .... it just doesn't make sense"

Yet another for the 'must have' list

[dem bones]

Robert J. Myers - The Cross of Frankenstein (Hamish Hamilton, 1975)

Jacket design by Don Bender: Jacket illustration by Robert T. Handville

Blurb
In this novel, written in the Victorian Gothic tradition and faithful to the style and mood of Mary Shelley's classic tale of the Monster and his creator, Robert J. Myers brings the haunting Promethean legend to wilderness America, adding enough excitement, irony and new twists to delight the genre's most avid fans.

Victor Frankenstein, a doctor like his father, had been given the name Saville and had no knowledge of his true heritage until his aunt gave him a packet of his father's letters, revealing the tragic outcome of his experiments. Shocked yet fascinated by the letters, Victor is intrigued when a mysterious American visits him in London and asks him to compound a fluid that Victor suspects is the synthetic blood created by his father for the Monster. Though determined to foil the Monster by adding poison to the fluid, Victor is kidnapped to America where he is forced to heal the wounded Monster, who is established in the wilds of Virginia, planning to raise an army of the dead. Victor is imprisoned, but escapes, and when an exquisitely suspenseful chase down a raging river in primitive boats eventually ensues, the Monster disappears over a waterfall — but will undoubtedly be heard from again.

The Cross of Frankenstein is a brilliantly written entertainment with some subtle philosophical questions at its core. Like the Flashman books and Nicolas Meyer's The Seven-per-Cent Solution, which brought back Sherlock Holmes, Robert J. Myers's The Cross of Frankenstein brings new life to one of literature's most colourful and enduring fantasies in a style worthy of the original.

Robert J. Myers is the publisher of The New Republic. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Incredible! a trash pulp horror novel even vault vets can't be arsed to read and it made it into hard covers! Spotted this on a stall in Spitalfields market yesterday, didn't even have to think about it. Last night, all determined, took it down from the shelf. Three pages later and i'm thinking perhaps it would be better to complete Diagnosis Murder 1: The Silent Partner before beginning another novel ....

it sure looks nice, though.

Happy birthday, andreas!

[Johnlprobert]

I had the paperback of SLAVE for years and could never get into it. And there my literary relationship with Mr Myers has ended!

[dem bones]

Jean-Leon Huens

Got lucky with a copy of the Corgi 1964 Frankenstein yesterday, taken it as a sign that somebody - or something - wants very much for me to give Mr. Myers' sequel its due, Goddamit! Three chapters in now, and it is really not too terrible once you get going, so maybe I won't have to rely too heavily on my Dracula & The Virgins Of The Undead endurance training after all.

London, 1838. Dr. Victor Saville never knew his parents. His father, a scientist of some repute, died under mysterious circumstances at the North Pole, his mother, a barmaid in a Hamburg Tavern, passed away shortly after his birth. Victor has been raised by his Aunt Margaret and, until his death at sea (a giant wave washed him overboard), family friend Captain Walton, and they've done well by the orphan, securing him a top class education at Eton and Oxford before he effortlessly breezed through medical college. But Victor has a dark family secret. On his sixteenth birthday, Aunt Margaret handed him a bundle of his father's letters, salvaged from the frozen Arctic waters by Captain Walton. It takes him the night to read through them, but come breakfast he's already stricken with the same crazed obsession as his father, Victor Frankenstein!
Dr. Saville/ Victor Frankenstein II decides there and then that he will continue his father's work though, of course, his creation won't be a monster but perfection itself!

"I wanted to be able to help man perfect himself, "the greatest happiness for the greatest number", not the deformed and starving wretches I passed daily on the muddy streets of their death-ridden slums, but superior people who could do superior work. Surely that was a worthy goal, and one that God could hardly take exception to."

Apologises for failing to forewarn you that, earlier in the same chapter, Dr. Saville advised us that he is a staunch Tory. Anyhow, fortunately for the deformed and starving, our aspiring mad scientist will need to locate his father's missing notebooks before he can get down to business, and they are likely annexed to a Polar ice cap!

Dr. Saville is visited by a mysterious stranger who gives his name as Frederick Greene and claims friendship with the late Captain Walton. Greene is on an errand for an even more mysterious client. He hands Victor a crumpled scrap of paper bearing a tricky formula for a blood substitute ("the heading was "The Fluid""). At first our hero is of a mind to refuse the commission as unethical, but wait, wouldn't such a serum provide sustenance for the creature? Nobody can confirm for certain that his father's monster perished out there in the Arctic wastes. Maybe the client is the monster itself!.

Just when we're beginning to wonder at the absence of a luscious Lynn Powell in all this, up pops Felicia, "the most beautiful, golden haired angel I have ever seen", etc., and the latest addition to Aunt Margaret's orphan collection. Dr. Saville, smitten from the first, shares the sob story of his life and, amid much dabbing at her eyes with a dainty handkerchief, Felicia enthuses that it would be a fine thing if Victor were to continue his father's work because he would ensure there was "no misuse of this extraordinary gift." Victor likes what he hears and they part on snogging terms. Felicia will be a handful, we'll wager!

A telegram from Mr. Greene in America. His client has approved the sample of synthetic blood. as "successful from all points of view" Would Dr. Saville care to voyage across the Atlantic and join Greene Importers as a joint partner?

To be continued ...

[dem bones]

The arch of her eyebrows and the quick laugh indicated depths of personality and a feeling for innuendo that I had not previously detected in our limited and proper friendship. She leaned gently and wickedly against my shoulder, and I blushed at the cleavage of her breasts .... absorbing the sun in a very un-British way."

Felicia McInnes is coming into her own now and won't have Victor moping around whining about how being the son of Frankenstein has put a block of on all thought of future happiness, etc., like he was auditioning to replace Peter Hammill in Van Der Graaf Generator. Just at that tender moment when each confides their love for the other, Victor is struck down by one of his skull-crushing headaches and so yet another postponement to the long awaited wrestling match. Will they ever get another opportunity? to crown it all, Aunt Margaret, aghast at the blossoming romance, begs the young doctor's forgiveness for introducing a "scheming Jezebel" into his life! Lucy is banished forthwith to go live with her uncle in America!

Victor accompanies Felicia to the wharf. Farewell, best friend!Farewell, woman who would be my wife were it not for this foreboding of doom that haunts me! Farewell, forever!

Or maybe not. Just as he's waving his beloved goodbye, some blighter stuffs a chloroform soaked rag under his nose. Mr. Greene is a very determined man indeed!

Victor, trussed securely, is held prisoner in his cabin for the entire Atlantic voyage. When finally the ship docks, Greene and his cronies - a drunken vicar named Mittel and a grotesquely deformed moron, bundle him, still bound, aboard their wagon for a marathon ride across the States. Victor is preoccupied with fears for Felicia's safety, while his "churning bowels" present another grave concern. If they won't ease his restraints soon how will he avoid the indignity of "beshatting myself"?

That's probably cliffhanger enough to end on for time being. it's certainly as much excitement as i can take for one day.

[dem bones]

Mercifully, from the point of view of both reader and the desperadoes have to share a wagon with him, Dr. Saville reaches his destination with breeches unsoiled. And who should be awaiting him at the conspirators' hideout, The Berkeley Springs Inn, but Felicia, abducted as insurance that Victor II does exactly as he's told, this with the willing assistance of Saville's loyal servant of twenty years. Victor is exasperated at his treachery. "Come, Williams, you were well treated." "That is the blind spot of the upper classes" retorts his man, not without justification, "In your eyes, my repression was good." There will be no such repression in the New Country if the creature has any say in the matter! He's fronting a revolution with Frederick Greene (who would later go on to edit the Grim 13 anthology i seem to recall), Rev Ritter, and the local deformed inbred morons as his army. Soon - horror of horrors! - the privileged will be ousted and all men treated as equals!

Victor is packed off out in the wilds to meet his father's hideous prodigy. The monster certainly looks the part in his designer bearskin get up (the head flung nonchalantly over his shoulder), but he's not worn so well, and his health is failing fast, the direct result of some fool mistaking him for a singularly repulsive poacher and letting him have it with both barrels. The Reverend Ritter, now stone cold sober, explains that this is why Victor's presence here is imperative. He must provide the synthetic blood in greater quantities! This comes as some small relief because Victor had strongly suspected he'd be imposed upon to try his hand at creating another 'the bride of' and look what happened last time. Fortunately the monster seems to have given up on that one, or rather, sex is no longer a big issue, as he makes some rather unsavoury allusions as to how he gets by in that department. To make no bones about it, there sure are some butt ugly sheep abroad in the region..

Will Victor betray his class out of love for Felicia? Will he be tempted into having a crack at a second, improved filthy creation?

[junkmonkey]

SPOILERS AHEAD:

I just finished this and loved it! (but not I suspect in ways that would please the author.)

Do I take it, Demonik, you gave up on this one. Pity, because there's some real cringeworthy sex scenes coming up later. (The Monster has his wicked way with more than sheep) Scenes that range from the the eeeeeeew!... (Frankenstein is on the lam from the Monster and his army of gun-wielding religious fanatics. With him is the wife of the Monster's second in command. She, as it happens, turns out to be a bit of a goer...)

'You do not understand love, Doctor.' She placed her arms about my neck and drew me to her. The fire inside her spread to me, and we found each other inside our bower. 'I want your seed, Frankenstein, for this night I feel fertile. I want your seed, to take with me far away, and to reassemble the life I thought I had but that has come a cruel illusion.
As we lay together on my blanket, spent, the juices of love warm on our genitals, our eyes looked up at the loveliness of the moon -

...to the WTF? weird... (here our hero narrator is describing his thoughts on watching his innocent beloved sweetheart being ravaged by the Monster.)

Clearly she had not sought it, but neither had she resisted. She had glided onto him as a shank of lamb seeks the skewer.

...to pure Marenghi... (he looks at the sleeping Monster and thinks of his ravished love.)

Felicia. I did not know what I thought of Felicia, her lovely moss covered grotto contaminated by the track of this offal.

* The Monster, apparently, comes equipped with an enormous knob:

There in the light of the candles and the moon emerging from his sheet like a serpent, came the head of his throbbing erection. It was a sight that hushed the throng.