OKAY AFTER THIS I PROMISE I WILL STOP TALKING ABOUT FRANKENSTEIN
I'd heard about Jean-Claude Carriere's Frankenstein series about ten years ago--before I was published a couple times by Black Coat Press, I read the entirety of their sister site, Cool French Comics, to stay up to date on all the remarkably neat characters dreamed up by the European pulp market. I learned of "Gouroull," Carriere's name for the Monster, and how Gouroull was much more violent than Shelley's depiction, or Universal's, or even Hammer's. Needless to say I was always fascinated by this, but English translations were only available as of last year! It's taken sixty years for Carriere's pulp series to reach our shores, and as of this writing, the reprints aren't even done yet! And while Frankenstein's Tower is not as fantastic or trashy a work as I hoped, it is still a book worthy of interest and a good hook for the start of a series.
Helen Coostle is a young woman traveling out to the Irish countryside town of Kanderley to holiday with her grandmother. She is a curious girl, but is nonetheless a Victorian lady, and thus is not that much of a femme fatale badass. While she is fascinated by the thrilling story's of Kanderley's old tower, which once belonged to Dr. Victor Frankenstein (now decades dead in the Arctic), her amusement turns to dread when an old vagabond takes her to the abandoned museum he lives in, revealing that one of the museum's lost exhibits was a glass casket containing the Monster of Frankenstein himself! Though she's assured that the Monster can't awaken as long as he's in the casket, he begins to haunt her nightmares, especially when she hears the sinister muttering of the word "Gouroull": the guttural sound which seems to be the name the Monster has taken for himself. Of course it isn't long before someone breaks into the museum and shatters Gouroull's coffin. Once more the Tower of Frankenstein has a resident, and it won't be long before Helen joins him...perhaps as permanent company...
Frankenstein's Tower is interesting because it shows to me that there is some parallel between trash cinema and "trash literature," for all that means: I would assume that a violent pulp series about the Frankenstein's Monster would be considered "lowbrow" enough to be considered such, even though how lowbrow it is is debatable. Frankenstein's Tower is arguably what I would think a pulp novel by Jess Franco or Jean Rollin would read like: sleazy, yes, but also patiently paced and "artsy" (read: light) in its scares, relying chiefly on atmosphere. And probably a little crazy, too. It is a full translation of Eurotrash onto the page, for all the good and bad that represents. For a lot of its length it's not particularly interesting, but when it heats up, it's worth it. Like the madman-in-the-police-station scene from The Awful Dr. Orlof, or EVERYTHING in SS Girls, the trashier elements help counterbalance the negative backflow of the High Brow. For example, there's a long sequence where Helen is kept in suspense over whether or not Gouroull is going to rape her. Sleazy and disturbing: yes. After this suspense is the book's ending, however, where the police decide to flood the tower with deadly snakes in an attempt to kill Gouroull--surprise, it fucking backfires and nearly gets Helen and everyone else killed.
It is a very quick read, and that's because it's written with a pulpy directness that I envy. The downside is that "pulp professional" has always reminded me too much of Ian Fleming: in case you didn't notice, I like my weird books eccentric and energetic, not dignified and...manly. Since the start of the pulp era, male pulp and paperback writers have toiled under the delusion that the masculinity of their writing will be increased if everything is portrayed as flatly and technically and dryly as possible. Normally this goes hand-in-hand with implicit and/or overt sexism which is why these books are repulsive to me. While he has a commercial staccato going for him prose-wise, Carriere avoids the sexism of his '50s highbrow peers, because Helen is a likable and believable protagonist. She spends a lot of the book as a damsel in distress, and being full of fear, but dude, it's the fucking Frankenstein's Monster. He tears people's arms off. I'd probably be screaming too.
To flesh out my cracks about highbrow stuff, though: the English edition comes with fore- and postwords written by Carriere. I don't really know what to make of 'em, to be honest. The man seems to take himself a bit too seriously, but he is one of the Great French Filmmakers apparently so maybe he has some entitlement to that. I feel like a super-artsy take on Frankenstein would be interesting, though this isn't it. It's interesting that he tries to do a thematic dissection of Frankenstein before launching into a book which is a straightforward thriller about the Monster, which doesn't really study the Monster in any depth.
But like I said, I'll probably check out the other books in the series. I've never seen the original French editions but these are good translations. They flow as naturally as any book written in English, and you could probably plow through one of these in a few hours. A fascinating read if you like pulps, European horror, and Frankenstein, with a few of the good old Weird Plot Decisions spliced in.
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