Our Hideous Progeny

"Our Hideous Progeny is set in the 1850s and the main character is Mary, who is the great niece of Victor Frankenstein. In the background is this debate about science—London is on fire with all of these new discoveries and there’s a fascination with science. It’s all very patriarchal. Mary is fiercely intelligent and hugely ambitious and she discovers the partly burned diaries of her great uncle, Frankenstein. She becomes consumed with the idea of taking his research further. Her husband is ambitious too, but not as smart as her, and she discusses the idea with him. They start plotting and experimenting and doing all this research. That’s what the story is about—the art and science of making a monster. One of the many things that we, as judges, loved about the book is the incredible originality and ambition of the story. It made us believe the impossible: that’s what it felt like reading the book. We all found the ending incredibly satisfying. There’s a great villain in the story, someone who is helping them and betrays them. There are strong feminist themes. It’s a Victorian feminist novel that also has a queer relationship, which is handled beautifully. In fact, quite a few of these novels had either queer relationships or interesting explorations of gender. There’s a bit of travel. They start in London, where there’s the exhibition of dinosaur sculptures at Crystal Palace. That’s how the author first got the idea for the book: dinosaurs-meets-Frankenstein. It was taking the historical reality that people were discovering fossils and dinosaurs and the author wondering, ‘What can I do with that? How can I make a Frankenstein story out of it?’ The quest takes them to the wilds of Scotland and they end up traveling up near Inverness, where they build a workshop in a boathouse on the sea. It’s about what happens there. All these books have a strong internal journey for the main characters, as well as the external adventure. That’s what makes them so compelling and satisfying."