Frank

 

Frank is R.M. Berry’s “unwriting” of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It tells the story of Frank Stein, distant cousin of Gertrude, who, in revolt against southern racism, succumbs to the siren song of linguistics, inventing from language a life of his own. But in creating a new life, Frank revives an old plot, giving birth to a monstrography. Frank’s undoing is narrated by New Yorker Rob Lawton whose literary aspirations have gone south, all the way to the Everglades, where he has encountered Frank lying senseless in a john boat. Their story within a story uncovers a more literally untamed America than either could have foretold, a horroglyphic creation of mad weirdploy and hybrid TV-speak which exacts a violent revenge. Only by making an end of Frank’s creation can Rob hope to escape the conclusion plotted against him one hundred eighty years earlier by an eighteen-year-old girl.

Praise for R M. Berry’s fiction:

“R.M. Berry again shows himself to be a writer’s writer.”
– New York Times Book Review

"Berry's prose is as active as Leonardo's imagination.”
– Washington Post Book World

"A genuinely aesthetic blockbuster.”
– Jerome Klinkowitz, American Book Review

R.M. Berry is the author of two collections of stories, Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart, chosen by Robert Coover as winner of the 1985 Fiction Collective prize, and Dictionary of Modern Anguish (FC2). His novel, Leonardo's Horse, was selected as a New York Times "notable book" of 1998. His literary criticism has appeared in Philosophy and Literature, Narrative, Soundings, Symploke, The American Book Review, and numerous other venues. Since 2000 he has been publisher of Fiction Collective Two..