Always a generous man with your insight, Alan. I appreciate that.

You know, I will say rather shamefully, I avoided reading Mary Shelley for a number of years. Finally one day it was framed to me in a romantics class, amongst the other predictables, as canon for the era. And I thought to myself that having a horror story in the genre is up my alley. I caved and it really was a wonderful story with far more room for interpretation than I realized. I suppose the take away is that if we operate on assumptions, we never really get out of that comfort zone. Or some such wisdom...