Frankenstein: Dead or Alive By Dean Koontz Random House Large Print (2009), 400 pages ISBN: 978-0375434723 Genre: Thriller

Reviewed by Israel Drazin - March 2, 2011

This is the third volume in Dean Koontz's Frankenstein series. It continues the story in the first two books. Readers may want to look at my reviews of the other volumes, Prodigal Son and City of Night. All of the books combine a horror tale and humor. They imagine that Mary Shelly, the original author of Frankenstein based her novel on true occurrences, but got the facts wrong. Both Dr. Frankenstein and his monster are still alive. Victor Helios is the name that Dr. Victor Frankenstein is using in New Orleans over two hundred years after he created his monster who he thinks is dead. He is evil while his monster is good. Helios is manufacturing what he considers new improved beings, a new race, that he intends to use to kill and replace humans. These will be beings that do his bidding. Helios is over confident. Although he has been experimenting for two centuries, his beings, now numbering a couple of thousands, and placed in prominent New Orleans positions after the humans they are replacing are killed, are beginning to fall apart. They were created to feel only envy, anger, and hatred of humans, no other emotions; but they are yearning to feel what humans feel and are beginning to do so.

Helios' fifth creation of a beautiful sophisticated wife to satisfy his sadistic sexual urges is seen eating in the living room, "as if she were an ignorant hillbilly." Harker, a replacement of a human detective, dies as a small almost translucent being comes out of his body, something that Helios never planned. "If any child were to come upon him accidentally, the unfortunate tyke might need years to regain control of his bladder, and would be traumatized for life." Werner, his lab assistant, develops weird ideas and begins to swallow other Helios' creatures; he is now walking around with six legs. A cat-like, virtually invisible Chameleon, designed to kill humans, has escaped and wants to kill humans without waiting for Helios' order, and Helios is a human. Will it kill him? The dead new race created by Helios and killed because they were unsatisfactory are beginning to talk in their grave. Have they been resurrected? Will Helios' first creation be able to stop Helios?

• Frankenstein: City of Night, by Dean Koontz.
  Book 2 in Koontz's Franenstein series. They are stronger, heal better, and think faster than any humans ever created – and they must be destroyed. But not even Victor Helios– once Frankenstein – can stop the engineered killers he’s set loose on a reign of terror through modern-day New Orleans.
  
  
• Frankenstein: Prodigal Son, by Dean Koontz.
  The first book in Koontz's modern-day Frankenstein series. Every city has secrets. But none as terrible as this. His name is Deucalion, a tattooed man of mysterious origin, who's traveled the centuries with a secret worse than death...