Our Hideous Progeny set in Crystal Palace – CE McGill

Submitted: 1st May 2023

What a title. What does it mean I asked myself.Well, progeny is ‘a descendant or the descendants of a person, animal, or plant; offspring’ but you put the word hideous before it in a book title and my literary hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

The cover drew me in big time. The mention of one character called Victor Frankenstein and his great-niece Mary (Shelley) . I was sold!

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Boarding Pass Information: Crystal Palace London

Author guide: C E McGill

Genre: gothic, historical

Food and drink to accompany: not much. With all these medical experiments you will be hard pushed to keep anything down.

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BookTrail Travel to Our Hideous Progeny

This is a homage to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and is billed as a feminist retelling of that story. I didn’t know what to make of this at first as I normally dislike retellings and feminist ones at that. However, this had something different that really made me appreciate it!

Mary in the novel has a great uncle called Victor Frankenstein who has disappeared in mysterious circumstances in the Arctic. It’s the 1950s and Mary wants to make her own way in the world but of course she can’t as she’s a woman. Her husband is a geologist but in this world of scientific discoveries, she can’t hope to find her place. She’s into paleontology but society just dismisses her and others like her with the opinion what does a woman know?

BookTrail Travel to Our Hideous Progeny

The novel is slow and builds up nicely with some rich gothic language to savour along the way. The pace is right for this story as it’s an immersion in a very special setting. This world needs to build like a flytrap before snapping and trapping you inside. When Mary finds some old family papers about her uncle and finds out a family secret, well, all hell breaks loose. This was one of the most exciting thrills of the novel improved by a dramatic and slow buildup.

This is a remarkable read I found. Yes it’s a retelling of Mary Shelley’s themes within Frankenstein but it’s more than that. There’s a world of ethics, science, motherhood and mortality in this as well as gender and queer identity which is not something I have read about much. A nod to a novel I know allowed me to get this on a whole other level.

It’s an incredibly compelling read. Congrats to the author!