“A filthy process in which I was engaged”: Revising FRANKENSTEIN Avidly “Terror, nausea, and the solitary slog of patching together cold, dead bodies in the workshop: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus created a fantastical, searing metaphor for the horrors of revision, that process by which writers try, fail, and try again to animate the corpses of their ideas.” Back to Essays & Stories