Detailing the cultural history of Frankenstein's monster — a literary figure so entrenched in our common psyche — is a daunting proposition. With all the versions and variations that demand attention, there's a danger that any study could turn out a little too similar to the creature itself: a shambling, directionless, schizophrenic beast, misunderstood by all who encounter it. Fortunately for the reader, Susan T. Hitchcock's Frankenstein: A Cultural History is no such ill-conceived work. Hitchcock deftly moves between mediums, interpretations, and eras to craft a surprisingly complete account of our fascination with the unnamed monster.

The story begins with his creation at the hands of Mary Godwin (later known as Mrs. Percy Shelley) and from there traces the path of an icon as he is manipulated, conflated, abused, honored, and redeemed throughout two centuries of reinvention. Hitchcock devotes special attention and space to those interpretations that have forever colored (for better or worse) our contemporary imagining of the doomed being: the pitiable man-child, mute and towering, with heavy-lidded eyes and a scarred, ghoulish visage. Hitchcock examines the true origin of these seemingly indispensable attributes, revealing, for example, that the character's enormous stature and greenish pallor were Hamilton Deane's inventions when he played a more melodramatic — and eloquent — version of the monster on the London stage in 1927. The book itself is more than just pop history and trivia, however; Hitchcock's expertise and painstaking research provide more than enough of the scholarly depth that serious readers will be looking for.

The amount of detail in Hitchcock's book is exhaustive without ever slipping into tedium. The reader encounters a tremendous array of interpretations of the character — as a misfit, loner, lunatic, orphan, and murderer — but the author's attention to specific peccadilloes never bogs down the narrative thread that chronicles the monster's centuries-long journey into our collective awareness. What ultimately emerges is the biography of a creature existing both as a fictional giant and a broader metaphor — a perpetually revivified and revitalized stand-in for ourselves, scars and all.

-Rob Hebert