Following in the tradition of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly, THE MONSTER’S WIFE is a literary gothic that re-envisions the classic Mary Shelley novel Frankenstein from the perspective of the girl Victor Frankenstein transformed into a Bride for his monster. To a tiny island in Orkney, peopled by a devout community of twenty, comes Victor Frankenstein, driven there by a Devil’s bargain: to make a wife for the Creature who is stalking him across Europe. In this darkly-wrought answer to Frankenstein, we hear the untold tale of the monster’s wife through the perspective of the doctor’s housemaid. Oona works below stairs with her best friend May, washing the doctor’s linens and keeping the fires lit at the Big House. An orphan whose only legacy is the illness that killed her mother, Oona knows she is doomed. But she is also thirsty for knowledge, determined to know life fully before it slips away. As tensions heighten between Victor and the islanders, Oona becomes the doctor’s trusted accomplice, aiding in secret experiments and seeing horrors she sometimes wishes to forget. When May disappears, Oona must face up to growing suspicions about the enigmatic employer to whom she has grown close - but the truth is darker than anything she could imagine. AUTHOR: Born into a family of eccentrics, Kate Horsley was raised in a haunted house on the outskirts of London. The daughter of a mad scientist and a crime fiction expert, she developed an early obsession with laboratories and monsters. At the age of 4, she wrote and illustrated her first collection of gothic tales, ‘Fenella the Witch Fights the Hairy Sea Lion Giant’, but struggled to find a publisher. After some years spent unravelling the mysteries of Medieval manuscripts during her PhD at Harvard, her childhood dreams of being a writer began to haunt her and she abandoned truth for fiction, returning to the UK to take an MA in creative writing at Lancaster. Since then, her poems and short stories have been published in several magazines and anthologies and her work has won awards. Kate now teaches at the University of Chester, where she’s a Writing Fellow. Kate co-founded the leading crime fiction site Crimeculture, which gets five million hits a year worldwide. She lives in Manchester with her artist partner, a ghost called Ron and a growing museum of curiosities.
