Reinterpreting Victorian Serial Murderer Gothic: Ackroyd’s The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

Turkey, ID LLCE2016-265;        Peter Ackroyd in his 2008 novel The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein  establishes an intertextual world through adopting Mary Shelley’s canonical novel Frankenstein, or The  Modern Prometheus (1818) as his palimpsest where he reworks the tradition of the Victorian Serial Murderer Gothic. In Ackroyd’s version, the conventional serial murderer story changes into the inventive incarnation of the repressed desires of his pivotal character, Victor Frankenstein, and the novelist is able to offer his narrative of a postmodernist serial murderer gothic—this time given in the form of a casebook that psychologically disturbed  Victor keeps that problematizes the relationship between the real and the hallucinatory, and also between the author and the text.

Keywords: Gothic, Postmodern, Parody, Serial Murderer, Ackroyd