Not Born of Woman: A New Take on Frankenstein’s Monster

Not Born of Woman by Teel James Glenn

A Horror Book Review by Debra K. Every

Ah, Frankenstein. The beloved nineteenth century novel that started it all. At the tender age of eighteen Mary Shelley began work on what is considered the first sci-fi novel. It has endured everything. Revisions. Bastardizations. Misinterpretations. And through it all, the Frankenstein monster remains. Not Born of Woman by Teel James Glenn is the most recent addition to this world. And what a clever addition this genre-bending work is. 

Glenn eschews the Boris Karloff-version of a grunting, lumbering monster and, instead, looks to the original, where “the monster” is an articulate, thinking being. Mary Shelley created a character who understands that his appearance frightens people. He, therefore, lives alone, hidden. But a series of events, false accusations, and the abandonment of his creator turns him into a bitter murderer intent on revenge. When we last see Mary Shelley’s monster, he is drifting away on an ice raft in the middle of the arctic after his creator has died. The monster is devastated at the death and ashamed of his own actions, determined to die on a burning funeral pyre.

It is this version—the original novel—on which Teel James Glenn builds Not Born of Woman. It is a hundred years later;

New York City in the 1930s. We meet a private investigator in his seedy second floor office being visited by a beautiful Romani woman. And the private investigator? Adam Paradise—a perfect name for this scarred, haunted creature. In fact, it is the Shelley monster himself who coins the name Adam. And what more appropriate last name than Paradise, taken from a novel the monster has read and loved: Paradise Lost. 

And so, from the very first page of Glenn’s book, we see Mary Shelley’s hand. 

The opening to Not Born of Woman is the classic set-up to the classic gumshoe noir novel. But Glenn doesn’t leave it there. Throughout his book he takes these noir elements and combines them with ghosts, the supernatural, horrific murders, and a mystery that begs to be solved. In the center of it all is Adam Paradise; articulate, well-read, philosophical, and saddened by the inhumanity of man. Here is a character who holds enormous guilt for his past deeds. He nearly died in the arctic fending off the elements, battling attacks, living in pain. He emerges in 1939 New York, a multilingual man who keeps to the shadows, taking on cases in an effort to find redemption.

something that Adam Paradise understands better than most. And it is exactly that sensibility which encompasses a character with more humanity than the humanity that surrounds him. His language has a formal structure and cadence to it, signaling that, yes, this is a being from a different time. And that small detail points to the impressive work of an author who knows his business. We’re not hit over the head. We simply sense the character’s separateness from page one. 

As a man alone, Paradise is forever asking himself the big questions that burden us all. Why am I here? Who can I trust? What is my purpose? Where is acceptance? This is a being who feels deeply. Through his encounters, he grows attached to people as never before. One can’t help but root for him in his search for acceptance and peace. 

In addition to Adam Paradise, the novel is peopled with distinctive elements and personalities,

each with their own distinctive voice. There are Romanies, Nazis, thugs, a serial killer, a terrified priest, lone sharks, and women in distress. This motley group of characters travels in and around a world of dark corners, hidden in alleyways and sketchy smoke-filled buildings; all following clues and ancient symbols in an effort to retrieve a necklace imbued with magical properties. Phantoms of the dead are swirling around the living and there are threats of supernatural evil on the horizon, with the worst of history, and its subsequent horror, threatening to repeat itself.

Here is an author who has clearly delved into the work of Dashiell Hammett, and Mickey Spillane, but also Edgar Rice Burroughs and Edgar Allen Poe. Teel James Glenn is no stranger to moving between genres. He is a prolific author of pulp, horror, and thrillers as well as hundreds of short stories. His previous work in film as a stunt man and fight choreographer is on full display, as well. He writes every scene, every fight, as if seeing it through the lens of a camera. The writing is clear and succinct. The supernatural elements are, at times, frightening and at other times, sumptuously drawn. The pacing is brisk. And the story can’t be put down. Lucky for us, Teel James Glenn has written an ending tailor-made for a sequel. We can only hope that Not Born of Woman is the start of a new multi-book series. 

A Horror Book Review by Debra K. Every

Not Born of Woman by Teel James Glenn

Send a Monster to catch monsters!

The year is 1939 just after a massive Nazi Rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. A serial killer is loose, leaving strange occult symbols on the foreheads of murdered young women.

Adam Paradise works as a private investigator with an office over MORT’S drugstore on Fifth Avenue, but Adam also has a secret; he is almost two hundred years old, assembled from the parts of dead bodies by VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN!

The reality of his existence became a legend and then a fictionalized book by Mary Shelley. After being abandoned in the Arctic by his creator, he spent many years in solitude educating himself.

Now he has returned to the world of humanity and has allied himself with many of the downtrodden and outsiders of society. He is determined to try and understand humanity as well as to find out what his place is in the scheme of things.

Adam’s state of being—alive but created from the dead—gives him the ability to see the shadows of once-living beings—that some call ghosts—though he cannot communicate with them.

In this case VANDOMA KALDERASH, a Romani, comes to Adam and asks him to recover a family heirloom, The KOSHTI BOK necklace that her brother used to cover a bet with a loan shark. It is reported to have occult powers.

Things get complicated when the loan shark sells it to a fence who is then found hideously murdered. It soon becomes apparent the series deaths of the young girls are tied into the pursuit of many occult objects, including the Koshti Bok.

Adam has his mismatched hands full as he tries to navigate a maze of deceit and murder that eventually leads him to a building in the Nazi summer retreat Camp Siegfried on Long Island.

He finds himself in the middle of a conflict between evil vs. evil with the life of Vandoma in peril, in a battle that will determine the fate of the entire world and may cost Adam the very humanity he so aspires to achieve.

“In Not Born of Woman Teel James Glenn proves a master of pulp crossed-genre mashups full of originality and verve. This book deserves some recognition.” – Lee Murray, multiple Bram Stoker Award® winner and Shirley Jackson Award winner

“An original and ingenious gumshoe epic, Not Born of Woman is what would happen if Raymond Chandler and Mary Shelley had a baby that went on to play Sam Spade on the silver screen. The characters jump off the page, and the story moves faster than a bolt of lightning racing down a laboratory lightning rod. Paradise Investigations is going to be the next series everyone is talking about. It’s smart, sharp, and authentic, but most of all … it’s alive!” – Nicholas Kaufmann, bestselling author of The Hungry Earth and The Mind Worms

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