Moku Kino Make, known in some circles as Dead Body Island, was located 500 miles off the Florida coast. It was a convenient place to dump murder victims and toxic waste. It was also a great place for a Herbert West-Reanimator-like mutation event. 

Here’s the moment when all the dead bodies and toxic sludge came together to create the titular Valley of the Frankensteins: “The rotten remains of two dozen corpses bobbed like potatoes in a stew of lime green Jello,” wrote author Dustin Reade. “Where limbs accidentally bumped against one another, they fused, shocked through with something very close to life. A chemical reaction. The fusing of RNA and DNA and melted plastics and medical byproducts.”

Reade continued: “Severed heads fluttered their eyes open, seeing milky white ribbons of liquid latex and petroleum go by as the desiccated remains of a human torso floated by in search of a new way of thinking. An arm here. A leg there. Not in any normal order. Not in any way that made sense, but it was something new. It was twenty-four monsters being born in an ocean of filth.”

A quick note here: Don’t judge a book by its cover, especially in this case. The Frankenstein monsters in Reade’s latest effort don’t look anything like goofy caricatures of Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester in resort wear. One day (I’m sure) someone will write a novel about Frankenstein and his bride taking a Carnival Cruise to Club Med, but that day has yet to come. 

Instead, Reade uses the phrase “Frankenstein monsters” to connote a secondary meaning. They were creatures of unnatural origins. Said the author: “They were poorly put-together people, a madhouse of wrecked humanity—their flesh a bubbling, pestilent cauldron of pollution and rot.”

They had multiple eyes, vertical maws, tails made of human fingers, faces like starfish and numerous heads stacked on top of shoulders like a totem pole. They were swamp things, iguana people and Kiseijuu-like parasitic beasts. Each new iteration was horrible and terrific at the same time. 

Into the valley of the Frankensteins rode a disparate group of mobsters, flunkies, FBI agents and hazardous waste personnel. After surviving a sundry of bizarro challenges on their own, they eventually came together in a climax involving a thirty-foot colossal beast made of human bric-a-brac featuring one hundred legs, one thousand eyes and endless rows of teeth. All the Frankenstein monsters were great, but for me the appearance of the toxic kaiju was the topper to this funny and oddball version of Monster Fantasy Island.

[ Valley of the Frankensteins / By Dustin Reade / First Printing: August 2023 / ISBN: 9781915546397 ]