$14.95
ISBN 188586535X
available through Amazon

Reviewed by William Dean
(01/07/04)

My mind shut down completely. I became joined with him, linked. I opened to his every painful thrust, and closed with regret with every more painful withdrawal. "Master, fuck me hard!" I screamed. And he did.

For those of us who grew up watching the tormented, shadowy classic Frankenstein movie directed by James Whale and starring the crazed Colin Clive and the exquisite animated corpses amalgamated in Boris Karloff, Nancy Kilpatrick's newly republished novel of the same title is even more phantasmagoric.

The behind-the-scenes realities of the 1930 film and its sequel Bride of Frankenstein were kinky enough. Whale, Clive, and Ernest Thisiger were campily gay in Hollywood's heyday of the celluloid closet, but one still never quite imagined Dr. Victor Frankenstein's monster grunting away in one's nether regions with the guttural "Fuck good!"

Originally published by Masquerade Books, Kilpatrick's horror-classics-revisited spin the familiar Victorianesque tales of Dracula, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, Dorian Gray, and others on the axis of SM like a prime sexual beast in a sling chair. It is not the sheer terror which is unleashed in the retelling, but the painful pleasures of the whip and thick shafts to plug the softer orifices of hero and heroine.

After Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein film had made silly and leering all the standard clichés of Mary Shelley's gothic tale of life after death, it seemed relegated to the Dumb and Dumber school of Hollywood's usual trashing of great literary themes, but Kilpatrick resurrects it as a sweeping panorama of hungers and passions once repressed that are brought forth in new guises and with new lovers.

While Dr. Victor experiments with the power of life over death, housed within him lies a pleasure-as-pain "monster" that he dares to set free. And he needs to set his strange self free to rein in his insatiable fiancée Elizabeth.

From under her skirts, she pulled out a simple wooden paddle, four inches square, with holes drilled through it. The wood was heavy oak, finely finished on one side, rough on the other.

Only her bottom was exposed to the frigid air, her upper body still wrapped in furs, and thick woolen stockings covered her legs. Those two rounded cheeks, so pale now, lay shivering with cold. I would be less than a man to not warm them properly.

Elizabeth's own dark and passionate demons drive her as relentlessly as Victor's desires to probe the mysteries separating death from life, and each experiments in their own fashion, sometimes mutually, sometimes with other partners. There's the expected mastering, of course, and the honorific slinks from person to person sometimes like a marathon baton to be wielded with Victorian precision and hot blood.

Personally, I would have liked a bit more of Shelley's story to have been woven in among the whippings, paddlings, and lusty poking. I can imagine the inexhaustible "monster" himself in a Caligulan orgy with everyone thrilling to his creepy, cold flesh and powerful, electro-juiced-up body. And the equally creepy, twisted hunchback getting his licks in, too. But I'm such a traditionalist sometimes. Nevertheless, aficionados of the relentless SM novel will find Kilpatrick's Frankenstein something delightful to shiver to in their restraints -- er, I mean, between the sheets -- on dark and stormy nights.

At some point, indistinguishable from all the others, I began to accept the strap. It had become my entire reality. It was all I knew. The heat it produced on my ass made me think of a tree struck by lightning once in a storm. The lightning sizzled the trunk, and steam rose from it, crackling. And then the sparks, followed by small flames that grew larger, until the trunk became engulfed by fire...I wanted the strap. Longed for it. Needed it for my fulfillment. If only it could work double time, singeing me until I burst into flame.

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