Member Review

Our Hideous Progeny has a very juicy premise: what if Victor Frankenstein’s great-niece found his notebooks and took his research down a new path? That niece is Mary, a hugely sympathetic and witty character straining at the bit of society’s diktats. Dealt a crappy hand in life, it’s not surprising that she’s flattered by the attentions of the dashing but flaky Henry. Let’s just say he turns out not to be the best of choices for husband.
I like that the book takes its time: a full third of it is spent establishing Mary and Henry in their life before the link to Victor emerges. C. E. McGill’s pacing is spot on. After steady establishing of the characters and the quest to create the Creature, there’s a race against time and a friend-turned-foe. It’s a delicious mix of the real world of the time (including a full complement of creepy men) and that created by Mary Shelley. I’m not usually a fan of epigraphs but here they are taken from Frankenstein and so directly relevant.
Our Hideous Progeny passes the Bechdel test in spades, and not only in conversations between Mary and her sister-in-law Margaret. It deals very well, I think, with loss and grief. Sadly, though, it also provides a reminder that even a brilliant woman could be overlooked, deliberately sidelined and lacking in agency (I think I’m still cross on behalf of the artists depicted in Jennifer Higgie’s The Mirror and the Palette which I received as a Christmas gift). And of course it’s necessary to suspend one’s disbelief concerning the Creature but that’s one of the joys of fiction. This is a pretty impressive debut; I look forward to reading more.