The Monster Men

The novel opens with a scientist in ruins. Professor Maxon has spent years attempting to manufacture human life, and his latest creation a grotesque failure he calls Number One has shattered not just his experiment but his certainty in his own genius. Now he must hide the evidence of his work while his innocent daughter Virginia remains under his roof, knowing nothing of the horrors in his basement laboratory. When Maxon flees to the remote Pamarung Islands with Virginia, he carries his secret and his remaining creations with him. Among them is Number Thirteen, the being that might finally prove his theories correct. But as the creatures evolve and tensions rise, Virginia begins to glimpse the truth about her father's "scientific ambitions": that he has been playing god, and the price of his ambition may be paid in blood. Written in 1913, The Monster Men is Burroughs at his most precursor to the modern anxiety about artificial life, a creature that might be more human than its creator bargained for. For readers who love Frankenstein, early science fiction, or any story about what happens when man tries to improve upon nature.