Welcome to Once Upon a Retelling! I'm a huge fan of retellings, and I'm really interested in hearing about authors' own love of the original stories, and what inspired them to retell those stories. And so Once Upon a Retelling was born, a feature in which I interview authors about their versions of well-loved tales.
Today, I'm delighted to have Marcus Sedgwick over on the blog, to talk about his latest novel, The Monsters We Deserve, a story that looks at the writing of a novel, and more specifically, Mary Shelley's writing of Frankenstein.
Can you tell us a little about The Monsters We Deserve?The Monsters We Deserve is neither a retelling of Frankenstein, nor a retelling of its creation, though in small ways it draws on elements of both. It’s really a book about the true meaning of Shelley’s novel, a meaning that has been largely misunderstood from almost the very beginning of its life. So it’s a story about writers, creation, writers’ ghosts and the ghosts they leave behind. It takes the form of an extended mental letter from an unnamed writer, whose initials are MS, holed up in a remote chalet high in the French Alps, to their editor. I didn’t intend it to be read as a ghost story but I suppose it is in some ways.
