In the first installment of The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club, The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter, it appeared to be making Dr. Van Helsing and Dr. Seward bad people. I didn't love that, but it was a relatively minor part of the overall story.
There were changes to many characters from many authors' works, but that part bothered me more.
I love the book Dracula. Because of that affection, I have read it multiple times, as well as having read some of the parts that were written and then removed. That makes departures from the book as written more glaring.
The series revolves around a group of daughters of scientists who experimented on them, giving them unusual abilities. They come together and solve mysteries.
Those daughters are Mary Jekyll and Diana Hyde, Beatrice Rappacini, Catherina Moreau (a puma turned into a woman by Dr. Moreau on his island), and Justine Frankenstein, who was reanimated by Victor after she was hung for the murder actually committed by his other reanimated corpse.
The first novel also incorporates Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. As it progresses, other characters enter from those books, as well as books by H. Rider Haggard and J. Sheridan Le Fanu.
As it is, I don't really like Arthur Conan Doyle's work and I haven't read any Haggard. I have mostly read Frankenstein, but my mind wandered a lot, possibly unfairly.
I have read Carmilla, though it's been a while, and I might like The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde as much as I like Dracula.
I actually kind of liked Rappacini's Daughter surviving her end, but the price was that her lover died, and her father as well, both of which were sad for her.
The characters from Carmilla don't come up right away, so that wasn't an issue. With the characters from Stevenson, Mr. Hyde himself shows up briefly at the end, but I did not immediately object to either half having daughters. That made the main frustration the maligning of the Dracula characters, and again, it started out small.
It got much worse, including unforgivable Quincy slander. Then Goss blew them all up while they were in pursuit of their evil schemes.
I have some thoughts about why it went down this way; that is one post.
In addition, there was something else that came to mind more recently when I read the spoiler for The Bride movie.
The tricky part with these posts is that I am going to criticize a lot of things without full or any viewing. I worry that's unfair, but watching them is a price I am unwilling to pay.
Anyway, The Bride apparently starts with the ghost of Mary Shelley saying she hadn't been able to tell the story before.
When I first read the movie spoiler, the way it was written implied that those primitive times wouldn't allow her to say what she wanted.
That raised my hackles; I really got the impression that she said what she wanted to say.
Something else I read made it seem more like she wanted to tell additional story but did not live long enough. That's not quite as offensive, but it's still questionable. Frankenstein was published in 1818; Shelley died in 1851. I think she had time.
Unless it's just that the actual successful creation of the Bride had not happened until well after her death, so only her ghost saw it. THAT makes perfect sense.
To some extent I had viewed the series as a feminist spin on works like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which leaves out any women except for Mina Harker, and always with Jonathan dead. I can see centering women, and perhaps also making the men less heroic to that end, my personal preferences aside.
However, making Victor Frankenstein sweetly devoted to saving Justine and nurturing, while the monster is pure evil, against the writing of Shelley... that's not super feminist.
I will add to this that I had not been interested in the Emerald Fennell version of Wuthering Heights. It looked like they wanted to take the eating scene from Tom Jones and play it straight. Okay, that's not how the book goes, but okay.
Then a clip happened to come up on my feed of Isabella on a chain -- completely degraded and clinging to it -- and I am just going to be embarrassed for everyone here because they should be.
One of the comments on the clip talked about the courage book Isabella showed in leaving her husband and then raising her child without him. I was mainly glad that her dog survived, and add nearly killing the dog to Heathcliff's psychopathic nature. Like many psychopaths, he could be charming, and that's how he got Isabella, but his cruelty did not keep her.
I am very irritated with all of them.
Related posts:
https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/04/spooky-season-finishing-up-series.html
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