Most will have a book which influences their life, but for Patti M Hall, one would shape how she views it.

Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel ‘Frankenstein’ has been a staple in gothic literature for centuries now, inspiring countless film adaptations and solidifying itself as one of the great horror novels of all time.

For Patti M. Hall, the novel is much more than just a story, it is her own life. 

Discovering the novel at the age of 18 whilst studying romantic literature from the 1750s as a part of her English minor at the University of Toronto, she was immediately hooked.

‘I started reading the author’s introduction, and she got to the part where she was talking about having knowledge of being alienated, of what ego can do to reject people, how we can be pushed to our limits. I wrote in the margin, this is me in block, caps with my pencil, and I underlined the three words.’

This immediate connection with Mary Shelley and her published work would go on to create a life-long love for Frankenstein and very much shape the way she viewed life and the experiences she had been through up to this point.

The Creature, or Frankenstein’s monster as he is often referred to, is the main character of the novel. Having been created by Victor Frankenstein and shortly after birth, being abandoned by who he considered his father, he seeks vengeance on his creator for his abandonment and his inability to live life normally.

‘Before I finished the book, I did a deep dive as much as I could on her (Mary Shelley), and I saw really quickly that she learned about alienation, displacement, family rejection, grief, loss, pain, agony. She didn’t go to the point of violence, but she knew it from her personal life. And then I was captivated, how this young girl knew enough about the agonies of life to create a creature that could experience it all and seek vengeance against the Creator.’

Patti’s exposure to hardships and feelings of abandonment as a child, having been told by her father at a young age that she had been an unwanted pregnancy and unplanned, wrecking her mothers plans in life, she had felt like a piece of a puzzle that just would not fit ever since. ‘I think everybody has a book that influences their life, but I don’t think people see themselves the way I’ve always seen myself in the creature. It’s not that I think I am hideous or put together, you know, in pieces. It’s not that. And it did take a lot of my understanding that I had felt alienated from my family my entire life.’

Having gone through this understanding of feeling alienated and how that made her relate to the creature at the age of 18, further relatability came as she was writing her first book, published in 2020 titled ‘Living Large’. The book is about mothering her son through a rare disease which makes him much taller than the average man and will always be chronically ill. ‘A good friend of mine said, you know, did you ever think that maybe you became a champion of giants and of your son in particular because of your love of Frankenstein’s creature? I can never say that to my child. You know, he’s this beautiful human being. He was 16. He was sick. I couldn’t think that way, but somewhere embedded in me was this understanding that Mary Shelley saw the creature and I saw myself in them.’

Mary Shelley herself has served as a huge inspiration for Patti’s writing career, stating that ‘Mary Shelley is a writer who created to understand, and I think I’m doing the same thing, but I am so infinitely fascinated with what’s not known about her and the creature, and yet, here we are, 200 years later, talking about the book and the movie all the time’ 

With her most recent book, yet to be published, being about how she has connected and related to both Mary Shelley and the Creature from a very young age and throughout her life and being a fan of the original book, I asked Patti about her feelings on the most recent adaptation by renowned gothic horror director Guillermo Del Toro. ‘Symbolically, to me, he’s a child and that I knew that was also true of how Guillermo Del Toro wanted him portrayed.’

She speaks of the accuracy in some of the portrayals in the film compared to the book, stating; ‘He opens his eyes, and the human he sees runs from the room. Frankenstein leaves him there on the table in whatever condition he’s in, and Frankenstein runs to his bedroom. He’s exhausted by the terror, and he goes to sleep. He has a terrible dream about Elizabeth. When he wakes up, the creature is standing over him.’ However, she also speaks of some of the important elements of the book that were missing from the film in which we see the Creatures first rejection from society. ‘He goes out into the streets of Ingolstadt. It’s only like a paragraph in the book, but people are screaming and running and throwing things at him. He’s so bruised and beaten down, he goes into the woods to be safe from people chasing him. He goes into the woods, and then a number of things happen in the woods where he runs across the shepherd’s hut. The shepherd goes, running out. He goes to an empty house on his way into France. He’s rejected, rejected, rejected.

Speaking on the accuracy of the Creatures behaviour, as portrayed by Jacob Elordi, she says that ‘It’s very pointed by Shelley that the people that he kills are the closest people to Victor, so it’s vengeance. It’s not just violence. And I think that’s what gets missed. Because in other renditions of the film, of course, it shows the creature going after people. I thought this film did such a good job of allowing the creature’s storyline to be pure. No, he doesn’t forgive Victor at the end, doesn’t kiss him on the forehead, that kind of thing. But there’s a piece at the end, because the creature gets to go off across the Arctic knowing that Victor’s done, and the Victor realizes what he did.

Finding the film to be rather Victor centric, she found it quite a struggle to adjust to the new additions to Victor’s plotline, feeling it wasn’t in line with what Mary Shelley originally intended for the character. ‘I couldn’t quite acquiesce to the newness of the victor plot, because you think about it, Victor had this, you know, financier that didn’t exist in the book, and that changes everything, because then there’s a financial motive. Then it isn’t just Victor’s ego and drive to understand the science anymore. And Mary Shelley really wanted us to fear the science. Remember that what motivated her was this fear of galvanism and reanimation and this manipulation of electricity.’

On what she would have liked to have seen more from the new adaptation, she said ‘So for me, I just wanted people to have a glimpse that the transformation of the creature was something understandable and a little bit relatable. You know, those of us who have been rejected or feel rejected, or have suffered with narcissistic parents or have been alienated by family, and there can be a lot of reasons why you don’t feel you belong. People who don’t feel they belong can introvert or they can extrovert. Something in the creature led to a physical expression of rage. That doesn’t mean that it’s the only thing that could have been seen, and the movie was pretty loyal in that to the rage. But some of that got toned down, and what got blown up, I didn’t love because what got blown up was a lot more white male privilege, and that’s not wrong. It’s just that we didn’t see it that way in the novel. So whether you’re loyal to the novel or you’re just, you just love the genre, I think you pick and choose. I think media adaptations are always about picking and choosing.

Both Mary Shelley and Patti M. Hall’s lives were laced with tragedy and unexpected hardships, something that many of us can relate to and understand. Relating to the Creature has helped her through understanding the past and has helped as a guideline for the rest of her life, from mothering her sick child to writing her most recent biography.