Mary Shelley’s BEYOND FRANKENSTEIN: THE COMPLETE SUPERNATURAL SHORT FICTION, the first offering from Tachyon’s new Particle Books e-book imprint, is now available through the Tachyon site or any major digital retailer.

Mary Shelley’s considerable fame is due to her great Gothic novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Frankenstein, published in 1818, is considered one of (if not the) earliest pure science-fiction novels.  Shelley’s powerful tale of blasphemous creation became even more celebrated through its many film adaptations, from Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein to Kenneth Branaugh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Shelley’s other works are not as famous as Frankenstein. She wrote just a handful of other novels, of which only The Last Man (1826) has remained sporadically in print. A precursor to such disaster novels as George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides and Richard Jeffries’ After London, The Last Man follows its protagonist through a distant future world depopulated by plague.

Mary Shelley’s portrait by Richard Rothwell

The shorter works of Mary Shelley are also less widely-known. During her lifetime, she published just over two-dozen stories, three of which were of interest to science fiction and fantasy readers. Two additional stories were published after Shelley’s death. “Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman” was printed in a volume of reminisces by a magazine editor who had commissioned the story thirty years earlier. “Valerius: The Reanimated Roman,” a story in a similar vein to “Roger Dodsworth,” remained unpublished until 1976, when both stories were discovered by Charles E. Robinson, a Shelley scholar, and professor of English at the University of Delaware.

In addition to all of Mary Shelley’s compelling supernatural stories, BEYOND FRANKENSTEIN also features an original story by renowned science fiction author Michael Bishop, which serves as a narrative introduction.

Tachyon’s new Particle Books e-book imprint highlights excellent imaginative fiction. The titles, or Particles, include both young adult and adult fiction; subgenres will include science fiction, fantasy, horror, mysteries, and thrillers.

Lovingly-curated, the Particles are a dynamic mix of original, newly-collected, hard to find, and out-of-print material.  

Particle Books was named as an homage to the faster-than-light (and as of now hypothetical) tachyon particle, perhaps best known from Star Trek.

Over the next couple of months, the first wave of extraordinary titles from Peter S. Beagle, Joe R. Lansdale, Jane Yolen, James Morrow, James Patrick Kelly, and Michael Cadnum will hit the virtual shelves.

For more info on BEYOND FRANKENSTEIN: THE COMPLETE SUPERNATURAL SHORT FICTION, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover design by Elizabeth Story