Frankenstein
In one sentence: Mary Shelley's 1818 novel carries the subtitle "The Modern Prometheus" — Victor Frankenstein steals fire from the gods to create life, then bolts the moment his creation opens its eyes, and everything that follows is the cost of refusing to claim what he made.
Overview
The explorer Walton encounters a broken Victor Frankenstein stranded in the Arctic, and Victor tells him his life story. Obsessed with "natural philosophy" since he was young, Victor manages, at university, to create new life — and is so horrified by what he's made that he flees the moment it opens its eyes. Years later the creature tracks Victor down and tells him what happened next: hiding near a family's cottage, he taught himself to read and speak by watching them, but the moment he worked up the courage to approach them, they fled in terror at the sight of his face. Desperate, the creature makes Victor an offer: build him a companion, and the two of them will vanish into the wilds of South America, never to bother anyone again. Victor agrees, then reneges, terrified of breeding an entire race of monsters, and destroys the unfinished companion with his own hands. The creature retaliates by killing Victor's new bride, Elizabeth. Victor swears to hunt the creature to the ends of the earth, but dies on the chase before he catches him. When the creature finds Victor's body, he realizes he's more alone than he's ever been, with nothing left but to die himself.
Why It's Recommended
The book earns its place through its subtitle, "The Modern Prometheus": in Greek myth, Prometheus molds humanity out of clay and steals fire from the gods to give them, and Zeus punishes him for it; Victor likewise "steals fire from heaven" to create life, and brings disaster on everyone around him in return — his pursuit of knowledge at any cost gets read here as the same kind of transgression as Adam eating from the tree of knowledge. The creature's situation is Adam's mirror image and its inversion at once: Adam wakes in Eden and is given a companion before being cast out; the creature wakes in a squalid hovel surrounded by stitched-together corpses, watches his own creator destroy the companion that should have been his, and never gets an Eden at all. That grievance is what turns the creature into a version of Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost — the line he quotes, "I had cast off all feeling, subdued all anguish, to riot in the excess of my despair. Evil henceforth became my good," is the exact template for his own turn toward darkness. The book's sharpest move is showing that Victor and the creature end up running the same logic of revenge, each killing who the other loves — they're not as different as it looks. And it leaves the real question open: is a person's capacity for evil innate, or something worn into them by rejection and abandonment? If it's the latter, who's actually responsible — the creature, or the one who made him and then walked away?
Source
Wisecrack's Thug Notes segment covers Frankenstein in its 2013-10-29 Halloween-special episode, building its analysis around a triple parallel — Victor and Prometheus, the creature and Adam, the creature and Satan — and quoting the novel directly: "I had cast off all feeling, subdued all anguish, to riot in the excess of my despair. Evil henceforth became my good," a line that echoes Satan's soliloquy in Milton's Paradise Lost. (First published anonymously in 1818, subtitled The Modern Prometheus.)