Anima Rising
Christopher Moore’s new novel, Anima Rising (2025), mashes characters from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into fictional Vienna of the 19teens. Moore’s imaginative alternative ending to Shelley’s Frankenstein alternates between being disturbing and wildly funny. Further, Moore sets much of the novel over a century later in Vienna, Austria with historic individuals like Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung (to name only a few) central to the story. By fictionalizing some of these serious historical individuals, Moore finds ways to poke fun at the absurdity of some of their characteristics and beliefs that do not stand up to 21st-century views.
This book was the perfect pairing for me, a new high school English teacher, shortly after introducing my 10th-grade students to the basics of psychoanalytic literary theory and then reading Shelley’s Frankenstein. Moore’s novel includes a hefty dose of raunch, violence, and the obscene, so it is in no ways appropriate for young readers (certainly not in a school setting), but it was a delightfully comic counterpoint to my teaching and lesson prep.
I highly recommend anyone who has recently read Frankenstein (perhaps in preparation for seeing Guillermo del Torro’s new film), and who is not fazed by more mature subject matter, to find their way to this book. The audiobook adds an extra touch of comedy with narrator Mary Jane Wells’s brilliant accents. Regardless of how the you consume this book—by ear or by eye—it’s baudy humor is sure to deliver levity in just the right moments.
Bibliography:
Moore, Christopher. Anima Rising. William Morrow, 2025.
