The Mortal Immortal: The Complete Supernatural Short Fiction of Mary Shelley

The Mortal Immortal: The Complete Supernatural Short Fiction of Mary Shelley by Mary Shelley ISBN: Book: 1892391015 Published: 1996 and October 2017 Available Format(s): Trade Paperback and Hardcover and Digital Books From the creator of Frankenstein, discover the secrets of eternal youth, souls that exchange bodies, and ancient Romans newly thawed out of ice. This riveting collection contains all five of Mary Shelley’s incredible supernatural tales, guaranteed to delight even the most jaded of readers. About The Mortal Immortal: Mary Shelley’s considerable fame is due to her great Gothic novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Frankenstein, published in 1818, is considered one of (if not the) earliest pure science-fiction novels.  Shelley’s powerful tale of blasphemous creation became even more celebrated through its many film adaptations, from Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein to Kenneth Branaugh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Shelley’s other works are not as famous as Frankenstein. She wrote just a handful of other novels, of which only The Last Man (1826) has remained sporadically in print. A precursor to such disaster novels as George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides and Richard Jeffries’ After London, The Last Man follows its protagonist through a distant future world depopulated by plague. The shorter works of Mary Shelley are also less widely-known. During her lifetime, she published just over two-dozen stories, three of which were of interest to science fiction and fantasy readers. Two additional stories were published after Shelley’s death. “Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman” was printed in a volume of reminisces by a magazine editor who had commissioned the story thirty years earlier. “Valerius: The Reanimated Roman,” a story in a similar vein to “Roger Dodsworth,” remained unpublished until 1976, when both stories were discovered by Charles E. Robinson, a Shelley scholar and professor of English at the University of Delaware. In addition to all of Mary Shelley’s compelling supernatural stories, The Mortal Immortal also features an original story by renowned science fiction author Michael Bishop, which serves as a narrative introduction.