Vonda N. McIntyre - The Bride

[dem]

He created an obsession he couldn't control

Vonda N. McIntyre - The Bride (Star, 1985)

Blurb:
She was his triumphant creation! Dr. Frankenstein had made her. But could he keep her from following her own wild, wilful heart?

"I give you the bride of darkness! I give you - the new Eve!"

Continuing where his father left off, Baron Charles Frankenstein, creates life in the castle laboratory. His first effort, a hideous, hulking travesty of a man, promises to vanish in South America if Charles will only provide him a partner, someone to share his lonely exile from humanity. Charles - assisted by an aged libertine, Dr. Zahlus, reluctantly agrees to do so. This second animated corpse-composite, Eve, is a radical improvement on the prototype.

Charles is enraptured. He's never seen a naked woman before - not a living one with a full complement of limbs and organs, anyhow. The creature weeps in joy! But ecstasy fast turns to despair when, on its approach, the intended Bride screams in terror and revulsion. "She hates me!" As the creature angrily trashes the lab, spilled chemicals ignite, as does Paulus, the obligatory deformed cripple who operates the levers. Zahlus is crushed beneath a fallen pillar. As Charles drags the Bride to safety, it dawns on him that this night's work could have gone no better! The degenerate Zahlus is dead, so too, the retard, and surely the monster could not have survived the inferno? He is free at last! Free, but for the delicious prospect of nurturing a super woman! As he enthuses to best friend, William Clerval:

"She might be taught what we know. She might dare to think what we think. I might make the new woman, Clerval. Free, independent, as proud and bold as any man -"

"My dear Charles, what a preposterous suggestion!"

But there is no stopping him.

"Imagine - a woman equal to ourselves. A fit companion - "

Clerval, conservative in his views, doesn't like the sound of this assertive-woman-with-a-brain business and worries that Baron Frankenstein is on the turn. Of course, if Charles is bent on indulging his perversion, there's many a Parisian courtesan happy to oblige, but "unnatural acts of such magnitude" don't come cheap! Maybe the Baron is in shock and better left to come out of it in his own time ...

Even so, Clerval can't wait to meet this mystery 'convalescent' Charles has taken under his roof ...