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The myth of Frankenstein in popular culture has so completely disfigured Shelley's deeply human story that anyone whose knowledge comes from its Hollywood depictions doesn't really know the story at all. The green-skinned lurcher with bolts in his neck is nowhere to be found in the 1818 text. What's there instead is something stranger and sadder: a creature who enters the world as a blank slate - no innate evil, just desperate loneliness - and who educates himself into sophisticated language and philosophical depth, only to be hounded into violence by a world that recoils from his face. Many first-time readers discover with a shock that the monster remains unnamed, with his creator bearing the Frankenstein moniker - and that small correction is the gateway to the much larger one the novel performs on its own legend.

The structure takes some getting used to. The narrative starts as a series of letters from an English captain, Robert Walton, to his sister, concerning his arctic exploration; the body of the novel is then a manuscript of what he was told by Victor Frankenstein, picked up half frozen by his crew. Nested inside that is the creature's own account, told to Victor on a glacier. The Russian-doll architecture can feel convoluted on first encounter, but it earns its keep. Walton serves as Victor's mirror - another ambitious man chasing glory through dangerous exploration - but unlike Victor, Walton learns when to stop. The frame isn't decoration; it's the novel's moral argument made visible.

It's worth being honest about the difficulties. This is a slow and ponderous work, full of anguish and depression, and not always thrilling to read - though it constantly stimulates engagement with its ideas. The prose is rich to the point of excess by modern standards, and the long descriptions of geography can read like padding paraphrased from travel guides. The mid-section, where the creature relates his tale to Victor, can feel tedious and rather contrived, and the pacing is inconsistent throughout - Shelley is succinct when she wants to be and digressive when she doesn't.

Then there's Victor himself, surely one of literature's most exasperating protagonists. His cowardice is clearly the point, but it is genuinely frustrating watching him make the worst possible choice at every turn - letting Justine die, destroying the female creature at the worst possible moment, consistently prioritising his own comfort over others' lives. The most glaring instance comes near the end: warned that the monster will visit him on his wedding night, Victor goes ahead with the marriage, reasoning that at worst the creature will kill him - a failure of imagination so total it strains belief. It's a fair complaint that many readers end up sympathising far more with the monster than with Frankenstein, who annoys to no end. But the novel knows this. The sympathy gap is engineered, not accidental.

And the writing, at its best, is extraordinary - particularly given that Shelley was only eighteen when she began it in 1816. Her descriptive prose gives a real sense of time and place, evocative enough to power the book's most memorable scenes, and the creature's speeches, delivered in formal, almost biblical language, carry a moral force that two centuries of adaptation have never quite captured. The contemporary reception was wildly split - one early reviewer dismissed it as a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity, while Walter Scott praised the author's original genius and happy power of expression - and that division has never really resolved. It's both things: lumpy, repetitive, melodramatic, and a work of genuine genius.

What keeps it alive isn't the horror, which is mild by any modern measure, but the questions. In an age of genetic engineering, AI, and bioethics debates, Frankenstein feels more relevant than ever - we are still asking whether we should create things just because we can. More piercing still is the question of responsibility after creation: not whether Victor should have made the creature, but what he owed it once he had. Every rejection, every act of violence against the creature, pushes him further from humanity until he becomes exactly what everyone already assumed he was - which makes this less a cautionary tale about science than a tragedy about abandonment.

Read it slowly, forgive its longueurs, and resist the urge to throttle Victor. The book that emerges from beneath the myth is flawed, frustrating, and unmistakably one of the foundational texts of modern fiction - a teenager's nightmare that the rest of us have never managed to wake up from.