Horror, begorrah

Here's yet more media attention for my Frankenstein interactive novel - coming thick and fast now that it's in the Top 10 on both sides of the Pond. This piece by Hilary Fannin is in the Irish Times and I found it the most interesting of the lot because she gave the app to teenagers and asked them what they thought.

Now, Frankenstein is not specifically intended for young people. It's certainly not for the middle grade kids who used to read Fighting Fantasy, given all the gouging, strangulation, mob violence, blood, guilt and sex. But I was particularly keen to see how it would be read by near-adults who probably would never look at Mary Shelley's original book. (And why should they? I'd never read it myself until I did so to create this new version.)

Conor Bulman, 17, plans to become a game designer, so he certainly got the point of hybridizing literature with interactivity in this way:

"You’ve got choices: which way do you want to go? Are you going to be a vicious killing machine or a monster that wants to be human? You’ve been thrown out of the house after twenty minutes of consciousness, you look horrific, you’re eight feet tall, you’ve got translucent skin, you can see the muscles underneath, you’ve got yellow eyes, your creator views you as a slab of meat. But you are human. You don’t know your own strength: you try to comfort a dog; you end up killing it." 

Susan Birmingham, 16, who is writing a novel of her own, said:

"Frankenstein is all about the characters. You get so involved. You want the monster to be happy, but deep down you know he’ll meet contempt... [The book] allows you to grow up with him, to make choices between good and evil, love and hate."

Lots more insights over there on the Irish Times website. And if you are curious about trying the book, you can get it for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad right here.