SOURCE: “What Walpole Wrought; or, The Horror! The Horror!” in Booklist, Vol. 94, No. 4, October 15, 1997, p. 395.

In the following essay, Cart touches on numerous aspects of Ellison's works and career, focusing on the author's views of modern science fiction, horror, and fantasy.

Quick! What do Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Count Dracula have in common? Give up? It's their birthdays. Well, it's Mary's birthday, anyway; born in 1797, she turns a mature 200 this year. As for the count: since I'm not sure the undead actually celebrate birthdays, perhaps it would be more proper to say that 1997 marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Dracula, Bram Stoker's eponymous novel about the ever-dapper, always-thirsty Toast of Transylvania. If Dracula is one of the two most famous novels in the field of horror fiction, then Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, Modern Prometheus is surely the other. Written when she was only 19, it wasn't published...