World Frankenstein Day 2025

This year, for World Frankenstein Day, I wanted to do more than just acknowledge Mary Shelley’s novel. I decided to live with it for a little while, to let it shape my meals, my activities, and even my evening drink.

Leading up to the day, I reread Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus to get lost in the voice of the book again. I have the W. W. Norton edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which presents the 1818 text of the novel. 

The night before, I watched the 2015 Frankenstein movie, a modern-day retelling set in Los Angeles and told from the perspective of the Monster. It struck me how difficult it must be to capture the feeling of the novel on screen. The book is sprawling and layered in a way that films can’t quite manage. They get close sometimes but there’s always something missing.

In the morning I made myself a deconstructed shepherd’s breakfast, inspired by what the creature ate when he first learned to survive. Bread, cheese, and milk were his staples. I kept it vegetarian and arranged it with a bit of humor. Pesto toast with spinach became my base, two cooked eggs with olives for pupils stood in for his “dull yellow eye,” Morningstar facon gave him hair, and tomato lips rested on a slice of Brie with a garlic nose. A potato was foraged from the pantry because it needed to be eaten. When I sliced into it I found a spot that had to be cut out and it left me with a heart shape. It felt accidental and perfect.

Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron were vegetarians back then, though they called it a natural diet. I thought a lot about how the creature’s vegetarianism symbolized his inherent goodness. It made sense that my breakfast, with its playful monster face and its potato heart, would carry that meaning too.

I worked in the garden for a while in the afternoon. The creature’s sense of wonder at nature is one of the most touching parts of the book, so it felt right to dig in the dirt and be surrounded by green things.

Dinner was pesto pasta with tomatoes. I had planned to cook kale, since that was Mary Shelley’s favorite vegetable, but I was too tired to fuss with it and the pasta was simple and comforting.

To close the day I made a Frankenstein Cocktail. One ounce of dry vermouth, one ounce of gin (I used McQueen and the Violet Fog Ultraviolet Edition, hibiscus berry gin that added a strange botanical clarity), half an ounce of apricot brandy for sweetness, and half an ounce of Cointreau instead of triple sec. I garnished it with Rum Bada Bing cherries, red as a borrowed heart. I sipped it from my green Federal depression glass Rose of Sharon punch cup, which is made of uranium glass that glows faintly under UV light. It was a perfect vessel for the night.

I hoped the day would inspire some connection. I challenged other bloggers to take part in their own way, to make it feel like a secret society scattered across the map. We may have celebrated alone, just like the creature. But I knew you were out there.

I want to keep living with books in my head and heart, even as the world seems to drift further from reading. Storytelling takes different shapes now, but I miss the days of my English majors in Intro to Lit, when I overloaded classes just to gather more voices in the room. I loved teaching those beginnings, opening pages together, watching new readers catch fire. The world has changed, and I know I can’t go back, but part of me still holds on to that past, to the quiet magic of shared words.

If you blogged, please drop your post link in the comments so we can catch up on each other's days!