The Autobiography of Francis N. Stein

Description

The Autobiography of Francis N. Stein: The Last Promethean

a novel by A. Rooney

978-1-948692-08-3 paper 18.95
978-1-948692-09-0 ebook 9.99
5½x8½, 216 pp.
February 2019

The Autobiography of Francis N. Stein: The Last Promethean will make you weep for this last descendent of the Frankenstein wretch. It’s a magically real tale in which such a thing might happen.

Set in contemporary Colorado, The Autobiography of Francis N. Stein: The Last Promethean is a hell of a story about the last imagined descendant of Dr. Frankenstein’s wretch—the spurned monster. It offers struggle and pathos, pain and absolution, deception and deliverance. Reminiscent of Neil Gaiman’s Shadow Moon from American Gods, Francis Stein is a slow thinking giant of a man who attracts attention wherever he goes. Stein seems cursed with bad luck, and trouble waits for him around every turn in spite of his good intentions.

A. Rooney is an associate professor who teaches writing at Jindal Global University in Sonipat, India when not in Denver, Colorado. He has published a collection of stories, The Colorado Motet (Ghost Road Press) and a novella, Fall of the Rock Dove (Main Street Rag). His stories and poems have appeared in journals, magazines and websites all over the world. 

What people are saying about The Autobiography of Francis N. Stein:

Mix Blue Velvet with a dash of True Romance, add some gothic and some noir, flavor with firebear and Pho—and enter the engaging, shifting, transforming, surreal vision of Francis, offspring of one of literature’s most famous creations. —Randall Watson, author of No Evil is Wide and The Geometry of Wishes

Rooney’s title character is a superb creation and, like Mary Shelley’s original, a compelling chronicler of life as a monstrous outsider, as terminally unique, “dependent on none and related to none” (to borrow Shelley’s phrase). Yet, driven by the police and other would-be destroyers high into the Colorado Rockies, Francis Stein manages to forge tenuous friendships: fragile connections with others that offer the possibility of redemption, of a second chance, of learning what it means to be genuinely human. Sharply written, with flashes of dark comedy and lyric evocations of the 21st-century American West, The Autobiography of Francis N. Stein gives us a beautiful monster for our time and place—as Shelley did for hers.—Thomas H. Schmid, author of Fools of Time

The Autobiography of Francis N. Stein: The Last Promethean is a story of struggle and pathos, pain and absolution, deception and deliverance.  . . . [It] is an inherently fascinating novel about the last descendant of Dr. Frankenstein’s wretched creature, the spurned monster who ultimately turned upon his creator. [This is] An inherently riveting read from cover to cover, . . . a compelling novel that reflects the author’s genuine flair for originality and narrative driven storytelling. Doing full justice to the literary legacy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, The Autobiography of Francis N. Stein: The Last Promethean is an especially and unreservedly recommended addition to community library collections and the personal reading lists of all dedicated Frankenstein fans.—Micah Andrew, The Midwest Book Review