Books Like Frankenstein: 18 Novels About Creation, Isolation, and the Monstrous Self
For readers drawn to stories of creation, consequence, and what it means to be human.
New to Gothic literature? Start here:
→ Gothic Literature: A Complete Guide to the Genre
Frankenstein is often remembered as a story about a monster.
What it’s actually about is harder to put down: a creator who refuses responsibility, and a being left to make sense of that absence. The horror is not the Creature’s existence. It’s Victor’s retreat from it.
The books on this list return to that same pressure: creation without care, intelligence without belonging, and the question of what we owe what we make.
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Quick Picks: Books Like Frankenstein
If you’re looking for your next read after Frankenstein, start here.
| Book | Best For | Central Tension | Why It Feels Similar |
| Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde | Classic Gothic | Dual identity | The monster lives within the creator |
| The Island of Dr. Moreau | Dark sci-fi | Scientific ethics | Creation without remorse |
| Never Let Me Go | Literary fiction | Manufactured lives | Quiet, inherited abandonment |
| Oryx and Crake | Dystopian | Genetic engineering | Creation scaled to catastrophe |
| Klara and the Sun | Emotional sci-fi | Artificial consciousness | A being learning love from the outside |
| Frankenstein in Baghdad | Modern Gothic | War and justice | Shelley’s idea of a different violence |
| Mexican Gothic | Atmospheric horror | Colonial inheritance | Power reshaping bodies and memory |
| Exhalation | Philosophical sci-fi | Consciousness | Shelley’s idea of a different violence |
Start Here: The Closest Matches
Some books mirror Frankenstein in plot. These come closest in feeling.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson
A man separates himself into two selves and loses control of one of them. Where Frankenstein builds a creature from the outside in, Stevenson turns the experiment inward. The division is already there. Jekyll’s formula releases what was waiting.
Best for: Readers drawn to Gothic horror as self-division rather than external threat.
Find a copy: Bookshop.org | Amazon
The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) by H. G. Wells
On a remote island, a scientist reshapes animals into something resembling humans. There is no hesitation here, no recoil. Where Victor flees what he’s made, Moreau continues. That difference is what makes the outcome so difficult to look away from.
Best for: Readers interested in scientific ethics and creation without remorse.
Find a copy: Bookshop.org | Amazon
Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro
Children grow up in a carefully controlled world, slowly realizing why they exist. The horror is quiet. There’s no lightning, no laboratory. Just lives shaped for a purpose and then set aside. Ishiguro does what Shelley does: makes you feel the abandonment from the inside.
Best for: Readers who want literary fiction that carries the Creature’s loneliness into the present.
Find a copy: Bookshop.org | Amazon
Mad Science and the Cost of Creation
These books stay closest to Shelley’s central question: what happens when creation outruns responsibility?
Annihilation (2014) by Jeff VanderMeer
An expedition enters a place where nature no longer follows familiar rules. Whatever is generating Area X has no interest in being understood. It simply continues, and the expedition changes around it. The scientists come with instruments. The place has other plans.
Best for: Readers who want Gothic unease in a contemporary, environmental register.
Find a copy: Bookshop.org | Amazon
Oryx and Crake (2003) by Margaret Atwood
A man reconstructs the events that led to the end of the world. Shelley’s question is extended to civilization: ” What do we owe to what we create?” Not one experiment with one consequence. A civilization that engineered its own replacement and called it progress.
Best for: Readers drawn to dystopian fiction with a Gothic sense of inherited catastrophe.
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Machines Like Me (2019) by Ian McEwan
An artificial human enters an ordinary household and quietly unsettles it. The question isn’t whether he can think. It’s what thinking demands from him, and from the people who brought him into being and now have to live with someone who cannot lie, in a household built on things they would prefer not to examine.
Best for: Readers interested in the ethics of artificial consciousness in a domestic rather than catastrophic frame.
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Isolation and the Monstrous Self
What stays with many readers isn’t the experiment—it’s the loneliness that follows. These novels locate the monster inside.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde
Dorian sells his soul for beauty and watches a portrait absorb every cruelty he refuses to feel. Corruption here isn’t visited upon the protagonist. It’s chosen, slowly, with great elegance. The separation between self and consequence becomes its own kind of creation.
Best for: Readers drawn to Gothic as moral unraveling rather than supernatural menace.
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Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) by Ahmed Saadawi
A junk dealer assembles a body from the dead left by Baghdad’s bombings so that, with a complete corpse, someone will be required to investigate. Then the body begins to move. Shelley’s idea carried into a different kind of violence: not a laboratory but a city eating itself.
Best for: Readers who want Shelley’s central premise transplanted into contemporary conflict and grief.
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Mexican Gothic (2020) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
A decaying mansion in 1950s Mexico holds onto its past in ways that reshape the present. The horror is colonial and bodily. A family that has been engineering inheritance for generations, and a house that is the evidence. Everything here bends toward a transformation that no one consented to.
Best for: Readers who want Gothic horror that is specific about power: where it comes from, who absorbs it, and what it costs.
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Books That Return to the Creature’s Point of View
These stories focus less on the act of creation and more on what it feels like to have been made.
Klara and the Sun (2021) by Kazuo Ishiguro
An artificial friend observes, learns, and tries to understand the people around her. Like the Creature, she is patient, attentive, and alone in ways that resist easy naming. Ishiguro gives her a kind of love that the novel never fully rewards. That gap is where the book lives.
Best for: Readers who found the Creature’s sections of Frankenstein more compelling than Victor’s.
Find a copy: Bookshop.org | Amazon
Exhalation (2019) by Ted Chiang
Stories built around precise questions: what is a mind, what does it mean to make one, and what do created things owe the universe that produced them? Each story feels controlled, almost clinical, and then arrives somewhere quietly devastating.
Best for: Readers who want to stay with Shelley’s philosophical questions in a science fiction register.
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The Golem and the Jinni (2013) by Helene Wecker
Two created beings try to live unnoticed among humans in turn-of-the-century New York. The tone is gentler than Shelley’s, but the question is the same: how do you belong in a world that didn’t expect you, made by someone who is no longer there to explain you?
Best for: Readers who want warmth alongside the existential weight.
Find a copy: Bookshop.org | Amazon
Also Worth Reading
These three are less frequently recommended alongside Frankenstein. Each earns the comparison.
The Book of Strange New Things (2014) by Michel Faber
A missionary travels to another planet while his wife remains on a deteriorating Earth. The further he gets from Earth, the less he and his wife share a frame of reference. Faber is interested in what happens to love when two people are no longer living in the same reality.
Best for: Readers interested in creation and transformation as a spiritual rather than scientific experience.
Find a copy: Bookshop.org | Amazon
Our Wives Under the Sea (2022) by Julia Armfield
Something returns from the deep, altered in ways that resist explanation. A grief novel in Gothic clothing: what do you owe someone who came back changed, and how do you love what you can no longer fully reach?
Best for: Readers who want contemporary Gothic with the emotional register of Shelley’s abandonment themes.
Find a copy: Bookshop.org | Amazon
Borne (2017) by Jeff VanderMeer
A strange creature is found in the ruins of a collapsed city and is raised by a woman, who is unsure what it is. Borne is curious, loving, and increasingly dangerous. The novel asks what we take on when we decide to care for something we don’t fully understand and what it means when that thing starts to exceed us.
Best for: Readers who want the Frankenstein dynamic in a deeply strange, post-apocalyptic register.
Find a copy: Bookshop.org | Amazon
These titles are also available at Barnes & Noble.
How to Read These Books
If you want something closest to Shelley’s original tension, focusing on a creator and what he refuses to face, start with Jekyll and Hyde or The Island of Dr. Moreau.
If what stayed with you was the loneliness, the sense of being made and then left behind, move toward Klara and the Sun or The Golem and the Jinni.
If what drew you was Shelley’s underlying argument, that making something and abandoning it is a form of violence, then Oryx and Crake and Exhalation push that further.
Where to Go Next
Continue exploring Gothic literature:
→ Books Like Dracula
→ Best Gothic Horror Novels That Still Feel Disturbing
→ Gothic Literature Starter Pack
Or browse the full collection:
→ 100 Gothic Horror Books: The Ultimate Reading Guide
Frequently Asked Questions
The pressure point is responsibility—or its absence. Stories in this territory tend to circle creation without care, beings that outlive or exceed their makers, and the loneliness of existing in a world that didn’t account for you. The supernatural is optional. The abandonment is not.
Frankenstein in Baghdad and Oryx and Crake both rework the idea in very different directions. Klara and the Sun is the closest contemporary novel to the Creature’s interiority. Are there modern versions of Frankenstein?
Both, and the question is part of what makes it durable. It sits at the beginning of science fiction—the first novel to treat scientific process as the engine of the plot—while remaining deeply rooted in Gothic conventions: isolation, obsession, the past pressing into the present. Most of the books on this list carry both registers.
No. Victor dies pursuing the Creature across the Arctic. The Creature, having watched the only person who might have understood him die, disappears into the ice. Shelley doesn’t offer resolution—only the consequences of choices made too quickly and then abandoned.
Never Let Me Go carries the same emotional weight with a contemporary pace. Exhalation gives you Shelley’s philosophical core in short story form. Both are easier entry points to the same questions.
