This October, San Diego Central Library has the most low-key, low-stress horror book club for the Halloween season.
Sometimes joining a book club can feel like a lot of pressure. What if you fall behind on the reading? What if you miss a meeting? What if you have nothing to say?
But what if all you had to do was open your email each day and find a chapter, plus fun facts waiting for you. That was the idea librarian Pauline Bronstein had.
"It takes so much pressure off you, you can read at your own pace," Bronstein said. "You don't have to go to the book club, so I think that's really approachable for people. You have the emails, and you'll have the content, and you'll have the book."
Previously, Bronstein did an email book club for Bram Stoker's "Dracula." This year she is tackling Mary Shelley’s "Frankenstein," a book many people may have been forced to read in high school.
"I think a lot of people don't realize just how interesting it is because it is a book that a lot of us read in high school when we didn't really want to read it, and a lot of us just Spark Notes it," Bronstein said. "That's OK. We're not judging. We just would like you to read the book this time because it has a lot of depth and I think a lot of people don't appreciate it. It's very different from a lot of the movies. Frankenstein is obviously not the monster, but there is a question of who is the real monster in the book. There's a lot of duality and thinking involved in the philosophy of just how these characters interact with each other, and how Victor isn't really a very morally sound character. I think some movies will portray him as like a tragic hero, but he's really more of just a tragic person. I don't want to spoil too much of the book itself for people who haven't actually read it."
Bronstein also points out that a lot of people think of the book as Victorian.
"It's made right at the beginning of the Victorian Era, but it's actually more toward the end of the Enlightenment in the Romanticism Era," Bronstein noted. "It really is peak Romanticism. It's all about man versus nature. It's all about the consequences of unchecked ambition or hubris. And I think that that's something that a lot of people might find an interest in. Just the ideas of what it means to be human, and how we judge when and if science has gone too far or not far enough."
Films based on or inspired by Mark Shelley's "Frankenstein"
"Frankenstein" (1931)
"Bride of Frankenstein" (1935)
"The Curse of Frankenstein" (1957, with Christopher Lee as The Monster to Peter Cushing's Victor Frankenstein)
"Blackenstein" (1973, a Blaxploitation version)
"Young Frankenstein" (1974, Mel Brooks' comic take)
"The Bride" (1985)
"Gothic" (1986, a surrealistic imagining of the creation of the book)
"Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" (1994, with Robert DeNiro as The Monster)
"Frankenweenie" (2012, screening at the library on Oct. 21)
"A Nightmare Wakes" (2020, about Mary Shelley)
"The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster" (2023)
"Birth/Rebirth" (2023)
Bronstein has been enjoying her research and discovering a context in which to present the book to readers.
"When this book was being written, it was the 1800s," Bronstein added. "But in the late 1700s, they thought that you could potentially revive somebody from the dead with electricity, and that was just falling out of scientific acceptance right when this was being written. But it had been the norm for so long that this would have been something common for Mary Shelley to write about. And this kind of atmosphere in that period of science might be going too far, was very real, and the fear was very real as well. And so this story, while it seems so insane to us, was something that was kind of like a true, like a speculative fiction thing rather than a science fiction thing for them."
Bronstein is planning a film screening (film title to be determined) in early November at Digital Gym Cinema as well as one book club meeting. You can sign up for the email book club here with absolutely no commitment. I am looking forward to a daily prompt to read a great novel perfect for the Halloween season.
And additional Halloween library events include: An Evening of Nightmares — Readings by the San Diego Chapter of the Horror Writers Association on Oct. 15, and Exploring the Paranormal in San Diego on Oct. 21.
