Life, Death and Satan

By Brian Truitt

“The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein”
By Peter Ackroyd (Nan A. Talese, $26.95 hardcover)

Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” gets a revamp with Ackroyd’s new work that presents the Frankenstein legend as a kind of conspiratorial episode of “Felicity.” In the 19th century, scientist Victor Frankenstein and poet Percy Shelley become friends at Oxford, and an argument points Frankenstein in the direction of creating life. His experiments are not met with success until he comes into contact with the mysterious resurrectionists, the Doomsday Men, and the tome takes a turn for the thrilling.

“Stardust”
By Joseph Kanon (Atria Books, $27.95 hardcover)

“The Good German” author makes post-World War II Hollywood his latest setting for historical fiction. Hero Ben Collier goes to California in 1945, straight from the frontlines, to visit his filmmaking sibling after a horrific accident puts him in a coma. Some say he did it himself, and when his brother dies, Ben heads straight into the underworld of a movie business rocked by talks of communism and a wicked web of deception to find the truth.

“Hell”
By Robert Olen Butler (Grove Press, $24.00 hardcover)

If someone’s going to take a chapter out of Dante’s book and write about Hades, it might as well be a Pulitzer Prize winner. Robert Olen Butler’s humorous and well-written tome casts a TV anchorman “downstairs” before his time, but one on-camera interview with Satan himself plants a seed in the news guy’s head that there might be a way out of hell after all. The best part, the cast of cultural icons Butler’s sprinkled around the hot locale—Humphrey Bogart, Anne Boleyn, Shakespeare, quite a few popes and George W. Bush.

(October 2009)