Book Review : Thriller Pays Homage to the Frankenstein Myth

Friend by Diana Henstell (Bantam: $3.95)

When a writer decides to retell an archetypal tale, we benefit by nodding our heads at the inevitability of it all, while at the same time looking at ourselves anew. The retelling reveals differences between our own vision, and those of the past.

Piggy, the young protagonist in Diana Henstell’s thriller, “Friend,” does not at first glance resemble Mary Shelley’s handsome Dr. Frankenstein. But like the doctor who appeared in 1819 as part of the romantic repudiation of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, Piggy is a scientist. And like the now legendary doctor whose name has become a synonym for the monster he created, Piggy challenges nature by creating life. Piggy, too, is motivated by love, but in challenging forces far greater them himself, good intentions notwithstanding, he follows Frankenstein’s example and destroys what he values most.

Henstell even uses some of Shelley’s devices. While her genius is a computer expert rather than a biologist, he, too, is aided in his efforts to bring life to dead flesh by a convenient stroke of lightning. The mysteries of electricity and the elements come into play when logic falters.

So much for the parallels. Henstell writes in a modern idiom. A fine tale-spinner, she forces us to suspend our disbelief to suffer with her isolated characters as they move toward the inevitable denouement.

All the More Devastating

Piggy is 13 when his parents split, and if ordinary adolescents are crushed, it is all the more devastating for an only child whose precocity and crippled personality have kept him apart from classmates, even in a special school for gifted children. We meet Piggy and Jeannie Conway, his mother, as they approach a remote Pennsylvania town. They are escaping from the memories of Boston, where Piggy was in some way connected with the mysterious death of a classmate.

But there are three personalities in the car crossing the middle Atlantic states: Piggy and Jeannie--and BeeBee. BeeBee is Piggy’s only friend, a robot that he built himself, which accompanies him everywhere. But BeeBee is benign, and there would have been no thriller had he been allowed to thrive.

The Pennsylvania townspeople universally fear BeeBee. So when a crazed neighbor destroys him, the not-so-kindly neighborhood cop explains, “No one in town liked that robot or the idea of it. And to be blunt, nobody likes your kid much for being smart enough to build it.”

With BeeBee gone, Piggy finds a human friend, another outcast, who happens to be the son of the local undertaker. At about the same time, Piggy is getting to know pretty little Samantha, the girl next door. This has the elements of an idyll, for “Sam” actually likes Piggy. But Samantha’s dad is the fellow who destroyed BeeBee and in the space of a few chapters we learn that he has been routinely abusing his daughter in retaliation for the desertion of his wife. Before the friendship between the two very lonely children is allowed to blossom, this totally unsympathetic brute murders his daughter.

Where the Horror Begins

This brings us a third of the way through the book to where the horror really begins. This second death (Piggy has mourned BeeBee as if he had been human) is too much for Piggy. He refuses to accept it. Confident that since he had constructed one friend, albeit a robot, he goes about rebuilding Samantha. And in a manner of speaking, he does.

Diana Henstell’s style is fresh and as unpretentious as possible for a deliberately scary novel. She delineates Jeannie, the concerned mother of a prodigy, with great compassion. We understand her problems, and sympathize with her efforts to help her son.

It is a cliche of our time that gifted children don’t fit in. I was a little disappointed that she made Piggy clumsy and awkward, as if there had to be some necessary trade-off between brains and brawn, a trade-off that exists more in the wishful thinking of the envious than in the ranks of Rhodes scholars who seem, perhaps unfairly, to have everything. I wasn’t as convinced about Piggy’s love for Samantha as whoever wrote the cover blurb. It is not “a love story unlike any you have ever read.” But perhaps that will come across more vividly in the “major motion picture” for which it has been purchased. You could, of course, wait for the film. But then you’ll miss having the fun of turning these pages into the small hours of the morning.