“Death’s Jest-Book” also marks the reappearance of Franny Roote, an ex-con who drives the normally reasonable Peter Pascoe to distraction. Roote has been the focus of Pascoe’s suspicion before, often to the cop’s embarrassment. The copious long-winded letters Roote sends Pascoe here, all of them perhaps hinting at Roote’s involvement in other murders, stoke the fires of that suspicion. Hill pulls off a neat turnaround. In “Dialogues of the Dead” Pascoe’s obsession with Roote seemed a good cop’s blind spot. Here, it’s hard to understand why the letters he receives rouse the suspicion of no one else, neither his wife, Ellie, nor his partner, Andy Dalziel — the “fat bastard,” as he’s called, not usually with warmth. Hill uses Roote’s letters to pull the reader into Pascoe’s obsession, leading us to an eventual understanding of the myopia of which even the best of men are capable.

Twenty novels into the series, nothing about “Death’s Jest-Book” suggests that Hill is writing out of habit. It’s an insult, particularly to a mystery writer, to say that his work is literate — a novel, by definition, should be literate. But it may be necessary to use that descriptive to get at the high quality of Hill’s writing. The ingenious “Dialogues of the Dead” featured the kind of mad wordplay that would set critics’ superlatives flying had it appeared in a work of “serious” fiction. The fineness of Hill’s writing is evident not just in the language itself but in the ease of his construction, the ease with which he cuts among his large cast of Yorkshire cops. Best of all is the poignancy of the burgeoning romance between D.C. Hat Bowler and the Rye Pomona, the librarian featured in “Dialogues of the Dead.” The real tribute to mystery writers comes when you can say that you pick up their books to keep company with the cast of characters. Dalziel and Pascoe are nowhere close to wearing out their welcome.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

“The Distant Echo”
By Val McDermid
384 pages
St. Martin’s Minotaur
Order from Powells.com

Val McDermid’s new one-shot has the kind of premise that hooks you at once. Four college friends are walking home from a party late one night when they come upon a young girl who’s been raped and stabbed. She dies before they can help her, and the friends find themselves under suspicion for her murder. The police never find evidence to charge the young men, but 25 years later someone starts killing them off.

“The Distant Echo” suggests that for McDermid the construction of mysteries has become effortless (or that she’s good enough to make it appear that way). As is usual with her, the characters are remarkably vivid; the supporting characters, particularly the dead girl’s family, are rendered with the sort of nuanced compression that short-story writers must envy.

But the real distinction of “The Distant Echo” is that it’s a novel about the way the bonds of friendship are inevitably frayed as people pass from adolescence to adulthood. Writing from the point of view of men, McDermid is uncanny about how habits and personality traits that were once tolerated or looked on fondly now act as irritants, how people who were once inseparable drift away from each other and how they can never really cut those ties that bind. McDermid ends on a note of hope that she earns. What stays with you from “The Distant Echo” is its melancholy portrait of youthful camaraderie battered by experience. It’s a terrific mystery and a novel whose sadness does not dissipate.

“Winter and Night”
By S.J. Rozan
400 pages
St. Martin’s Minotaur
Order from Powells.com

I’m late coming to S.J. Rozan’s mysteries, the latest of which, “Winter and Night,” is already in paperback. Probably a lot of my readers have long been hip to what I’ve been missing. Rozan’s novels are narrated by one or the other of her private investigator partners, Bill Smith and Lydia Chin. They’re both residents of downtown Manhattan, Smith in a loft above a SoHo bar, Chin in the Chinatown apartment she shares with her mother. There is an easy relationship between the two, and a physical familiarity situated somewhere between the deep affection of friends and the tension of would-be lovers. Theirs is one of the most believable working relationships in contemporary fiction.

The subject of “Winter and Night,” a Bill Smith novel, is school violence — also the subject of Ian Rankin’s “Question of Blood,” which will be published in the United States in February. “Winter and Night” did not attract as much attention as Gus Van Sant’s Columbine film “Elephant,” but where the Van Sant film has the cooled-out voyeurism of the hippest art installation, Rozan’s has the vital instincts of good, solid muckraking. The plot involves Bill’s runaway nephew, the apparent murder of the boy’s classmate, and the privileges accorded to jocks in high school society.

With the Long Island football camp rapes in the news, “Winter and Night” (written well before that event) is certainly relevant. But Rozan is above editorializing. “Winter and Night” takes you right back to every bit of high school bullying you ever experienced and connects it to the cant high schools put out about turning out good, solid citizens. Rozan gets at the rot of suburbia in “Winter and Night,” but unlike nearly all the filmmakers and novelists who have addressed that subject from a superior height, Rozan isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

“The Babes in the Wood”
By Ruth Rendell
336 pages
Crown
Order from Powells.com

There’s still a cozy image of mysteries as something to curl up with in front of a comfy fire. The fire would have to be an inferno to dispel the chill of Ruth Rendell’s writing. Not that the subject of the 19th Inspector Wexford mystery, “The Babes in the Wood” (Rendell’s 60th book overall) is all that scary. The chill Rendell imparts comes from the cold precision of her view of human nature. There’s a throb of misanthropy in Rendell’s writing, which is rational and considered and unsparing and has the feel of a consistent vision. Her skepticism about humanity never lapses into the showy barroom bitterness of bad hard-boiled writing.

In “The Babes in the Wood,” two teenagers have disappeared along with the woman watching them while their parents are out of town. And it’s typical of Rendell’s chilliness that the grieving parents are presented mercilessly: The mother is a hysteric with only a tenuous grip on reality, and the father is a man whose main reaction to his children’s disappearance is resentment at the time it takes away from his work. But they are not the only characters on whom Rendell’s cold eye is cast. Icicles nearly hang off the prosperous middle-aged drunk who discovers one of the bodies of the missing and, at the behest of his model wife, keeps it to himself so as not to disturb their social schedule. There’s also a fundamentalist cult who’ve given themselves forbidding Old Testament names and whose knowledge of God appears never to have been disturbed by the specter of love or forgiveness. The treatment of these dried-out Bible thumpers is a particular pleasure, given the contemporary tendency to invoke respecting the beliefs of others when speaking of even the looniest religious cult.

And then there’s Wexford, the least affable of nearly all the recurring heroes of British detective fiction. He’s an atheist still enamored of his wife, Dora, but clueless when it comes to what to get her for Christmas. He is frustrated with his oldest daughter, a woman whose foolishness impedes any love he feels for her.

For a book that has such disdain for fundamentalism, Rendell herself writes with something like the wrath of an Old Testament scourge, one whose fire and brimstone has been brought down to absolute zero. Floods threaten to engulf the countryside through much of the book (you can’t get more biblical than that) and many of the characters make it seem as if the vengeance of nature would be a good idea.

It’s hard to say why such a cold writer doesn’t feel unpleasant or cheaply misanthropic to read. Some of it can be put down to Rendell’s psychological acuity, but a great deal of what makes her a major novelist is her implicit moral vision. There’s a principled disgust at work in her books, a disgust that expresses itself in reserved and piercing perception rather than outrage. She may not like what she sees, but you feel she has given it her full consideration. Another reason for the pleasure of reading Rendell may be less reputable — there’s a certain relief in admitting, for a couple hundred pages or so every year, that people are often appalling.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

“The Murder Room”
By P.D. James
432 pages
Alfred A. Knopf

- – - – - – - – - – - -

“Last Car to Elysian Fields: A Dave Robicheaux Novel”
By James Lee Burke
352 pages
Simon & Schuster

I’ve tried to focus this column on books I can recommend, but these two releases represent such a serious decline for two previously fine writers that I can’t let them pass unmentioned.

After about 100 pages of P.D. James’ latest Adam Dalgliesh mystery, “The Murder Room,” I gave up. It wasn’t so much that the mystery took that long to even get started, or James’ plodding method of using each new chapter to introduce a character in the manner of a “well-made” stage play from the ’40s. The problem with “The Murder Room” is that it’s set in the present and no one and nothing in it feels like they have any connection with any recognizable part of contemporary life. There should be a place for writers and artists who feel out of step with the modern world, but that disjunction needs, at the least, to be acknowledged.

James can take credit for bringing a certain psychological realism to the British mystery, and her best books, “A Taste for Death” and “Devices and Desires,” suggest not only a critique of the genre but of British life. In the midst, though, of the work being done by the likes of Ian Rankin, Reginald Hill, Val McDermid, Denise Mina, John Harvey, Peter Robinson, Mark Bellingham, Stephen Booth and others, James’ recent work feels like those literate, dead, stiff-upper-lip British movies of decades ago. There is perhaps no other way to read a sentence like this one, “From childhood the word London had conjured up for Tallulah Clutton a vision of a fabled city, a world of mystery and excitement,” except as parody. Sadly, that’s not how it’s intended.

In James Lee Burke’s “Last Car to Elysian Fields,” his hero Dave Robicheaux has lost his wife to lupus, and his family home to a slipshod wiring job. And speaking for myself, Burke has lost at least one reader. The humorless moralism that was always present in Burke’s writing has completely taken over the Robicheaux series. As heroes go, Robicheaux was always something of an uptight pain in the ass — the kind of guy who’d chew you out if you said “damn” in his home. Here, he’s tormented by his recent losses, but Burke endorses the mindset this leads him to.

With the disapproval you find in some reformed boozers, Robicheaux treats everyone with a drink in their hand as a potential alcoholic. Anyone lucky enough to have made money and enjoy even a moderately lavish lifestyle is sure to have done it by dirty means. Express any sexual desire outside of marriage and you’re trafficking in human depravity. Halfway through “Last Car to Elysian Fields” you wonder if Robicheaux’s prissiness isn’t the setup for a plot twist that will reveal that the French Catholic heritage of New Orleans was invaded, generations ago, by Puritan pod people. That wouldn’t be any more nuts than the plot elements Burke does introduce, like a porn producer who steals dialogue from a best-selling romance novelist in order to make his films more literate (!). You have to be operating in some parallel universe if you think the script is important in pornography. If you’re looking for a sermon, I heartily recommend the latest Burke. All others beware.

My 5-year-old son, Alekos, sits on the balcony of our apartment. Visible from there are pine trees and details of other people’s lives, audible are the sounds of morning, the birds above and voices below. Evenings, Alekos lies on the divan on the balcony in his pajamas, watching the moon. He is obsessed with it, and his father made him a playlist of all the Greek songs that mention it. When he was smaller he’d stare at the moon until he fell asleep.

This morning, though, Alekos lies flat on the ground, peering down through the slats of the railing, staring at the trash. Next to him is his iPad ­– a gift from his father, and yes, I know, but his father doesn’t live with us and what can you do?­ — and now he favors bad pop music like the older kids at school. So I’m surprised this morning when I hear the sounds of Elmo counting. He’s embarrassed by this favorite YouTube clip­­ – it’s for babies, he says ­­­­– but it comforts him. The tension these days is overwhelming.

Alekos looks up when he sees me, furrows his brow, and tells me if he were a deputy like his father, he’d force everyone to clean up the garbage. “And to make a new government,” he says.

I tell him that would be nice.

“At least I can fly,” he says. He is wearing the Spider-Man costume my sister brought him from the States.

I tell him Spider-Man jumps and leaps and sticks to things. He doesn’t fly. “Besides,” I quickly add, thinking of all the balconies around us. “You’re not Spider-Man.” Even I have wondered what it might be like to jump from one to the next. I smooth his light hair, which is growing long. “You need a haircut,” I say.

I hold out two polos, one white, one blue, so he feels he has a choice. He pulls the blue shirt over the costume, and I hope that his teachers aren’t too upset by this because I am too exhausted to argue with him.

Outside, the trash has piled up, and Alekos can’t get into the car from the curb. I tell him I’ll pull the car up so he can get in without pushing his way through the refuse. He wrinkles his nose at the smell. But when I get to the driver’s side, Alekos is no longer standing there.

Instead he is floating 12 feet above the curb, his Spider-Man-clad arms stretched out like wings.

“Alekos,” is all I can say, “get down.” He swoops over to me, hovering just above my reach, and finally glides gracefully to my feet as if he has been practicing this move for months. Bending down to face him and gripping the straps of his backpack, I have the panicked feeling that if I let go he will fly away.

“How long has this been going on?” I whisper. “Tell me.”

One old man walks past us with his hands behind his back and says nothing. He barely notices us. Across the street a woman hurries along in heels, yelling into her phone. No one else is around.

Alekos shrugs, aloof, and looks away with those dark eyes, almost black, like his father’s. “I tried to tell you.”

“Does Babas know about this?” I ask, suddenly sure his father would keep this from me, just the way he failed to mention his girlfriend was staying the night, reading Alekos bedtime stories when he stayed there. Oh, the flying? I thought you knew?

“No,” Alekos says.

“Just at home, OK?” I say. I don’t want to alarm him, but I want to be firm.

He digs in his backpack and tells me he saw his father on the news that morning. This is one reason I don’t like him to watch television at all. For the rest of the drive, we’re quiet.

“I know I’m not Spider-Man,” he says finally, when we arrive.

“OK,” I say. “Do you fly at school?” I ask.

“No.” He looks at me in the rearview mirror, completely incredulous. “Nobody does.”

He gets out of the car and hurries off to meet some other kids, who admire his Spider-Man arms as if they are tattooed. I wait for him to turn around and wave but he doesn’t, and for a moment it seems his feet levitate off the ground. But maybe I am imagining it; he walks in, one foot after the other, like everyone else. I park at the metro station and take the train into the city center, turning up the ringer on my phone.

I call his father three times but get his voice mail. I text him to call me. He texts me an hour later — Ola kala? — and I trip over a split-open trash bag, as if these sidewalks weren’t already treacherous enough. I answer, Yes, everything’s fine. This will have to wait until we are face to face, which is not often.

We met when I was teaching art classes on Paros one summer. I soon got pregnant, and we didn’t get married, but I stayed in Greece. I think he still resents me for not marrying him. To be honest, I can’t even remember my reasons. It all seems like another lifetime, decades ago, when Athens felt proud and vibrant those few years after the Olympics.

A few more messages come from him but I’m busy and don’t answer. Then, when I’m outside the museum, finishing my installation, he shows up.

“You don’t call me three times in a row with no message,” he says, frustrated. “You barely call me at all, unless the kid is on fire.”

No, not fire, I think.

He surveys my project, one giant megaphone outside the  museum, the size of a kiosk, with cameras inside that will film street activity and project it onto a screen inside. Tiny figurines in various stages of undress shoot out from the megaphone, suspended by invisible wire. I’ve compiled old Greek footage of both celebrations and protests, which will air inside the museum, and the outdoor footage will be superimposed on those old clips. I wonder if anyone is inside now, watching us, or what we’re matched with: a hectic street scene, a political rally, a brilliant August moon?

“I like it,” he says, in English, in that supportive tone he uses when he doesn’t know what to say about my work but wants to convey he approves.

“Oh, stop it,” I say.

“And with the garbage,” he says. “A nice touch.”

And the two of us laugh, the first time we have laughed together in a long time, since before the elections, since before the crisis, probably not since Alekos was an infant and we marveled at every smile and uttered “word.” Suddenly I think I should have thought to make those tiny figures children, with wings. I wonder why I didn’t think of it before, why it always takes the manifestation of something so crazy to make me realize something so simple.

“Let me take you for a coffee,” he says, “or something stronger? We can sit outside, where it’s quiet.” The trash stench is so bad that everyone sits inside, smoking.

“You have time for that?” I ask, knowing he doesn’t. I can hear his phone buzzing in his pocket. “I should keep working.”

One night, right before these last elections, he came to pick Alekos up and he kissed me when Alekos went to grab his toys. “Not yet,” I said. My attempt at self-preservation while the rest of the country implodes. It’s hard enough just to be friends.

“OK,” he said then. “We’ll get there, one day.”

Now, I lean into him a moment. Together we survey what I’ve made. I want to tell him, Our son can fly. I want to tell him, Stay.

“Are we there yet,” he says quietly, distantly, not as question but statement, and he rests his chin on my head and looks out into the street: the sleepy shops, the political posters pasted over the boarded-up kiosks, the hot afternoon sun beating down on it all. “Are we?”

And then my phone is ringing­­ — it’s the school office — and I know of course what has happened. I imagine Alekos flying around his classroom like an angry bee, out into the schoolyard, beyond the trash, beyond the protests and our land in limbo. Or maybe he is more relaxed, gliding effortlessly the way I fly in my dreams, his superhero costume and sandy hair glowing in the afternoon sun, until he finds us here, his parents who don’t know where we are or where we’re going, and taking us up with him, catapulting us into the vast unknown. Our images would flicker on the screen inside, soaring above that old footage of our shattered, magnificent city.

Isabel picks up the manuscript with both hands, flips it over, and uses her thumbs to align the pages. She takes a deep breath, lets out a long sigh.

Another night lying in bed, working. She’d fallen asleep at 11, then woke sometime after 2, her mind unquiet. But it wasn’t until 3 that she admitted she was awake. She then picked up a manuscript and a pencil, and started working, page after page, all through the desperate hours. Vaguely reminiscent of those days when Nicky was an infant, in the middle of the night, sleep-deprived, awake in a dormant world. The small hours when a blanket of quiet smothers the city, but through the moth-eaten holes there’s the occasional lowing of a railroad in New Jersey, the distant Dopplered wail of an ambulance siren. Then the inevitable thump of the newspaper on the doormat, the end of the idea of night, even though it’s still dark out.

She stares across the room, off into the black nothingness of the picture window on the opposite wall, its severe surface barely softened by the half-drawn shades, an aggressive void invading the serene cocoon of her bedroom. The room is barely lit by a small bullet-shaped reading sconce mounted over the headboard, aiming a beam of light directly at the top of her head, creating a halo in the reflection in the window. An angel. Except she’s not.

Isabel shuffles into the dark hall, flips the light switch. She turns on the kitchen lights, and the coffee — switched from auto-on, which is set to start brewing an hour from now, to on — and the small television on the counter. Filling the lonely apartment with humming electronic life.

The coffee machine hisses and sputters, big plops falling into the tempered glass. She watches the contraption’s clock, changing from 5:48 to 5:49. Grabs the plastic handle of the carafe and fills the mug with hot, viscous, bitter, bracing caffeination. She takes a small sip, then a larger one.

She walks down the hall, lined with the photographs that she’d unearthed four years ago, when she was moving out of her matrimonial apartment, into this single-woman space in a new neighborhood, far from the painful memories of her home — of her life — downtown, where she’d been running into too many mothers, often with their children. Women she’d known from the playgrounds and the toy stores and the mommy-and-me music classes, from the gyms and grocers and coffee shops, from preschool drop-off and the waiting room at the pediatrician’s. All those other little children growing older, getting bigger.

So she’d bought herself a one-bedroom in an uptown full-service building, the type of apartment that a woman chooses when she reconciles herself that she’s not going to be living with another human being, probably forever. That she’s making her loneliness comfortable. Palliative care.

She lined this nice new hallway with framed photos. There she is, herself, a smiling little toddler. And with her mother on the first day of second grade. At college graduation with her two best friends. There are her grandparents, at the final family reunion before they both died, within weeks of each other. Isabel in a big white dress, aglow, in the middle of the panoramic-lens group shot. A much smaller print, lying in a hospital bed, beaming at Nicky in her arms, tiny and red and angry in his swaddling blanket and blue cap. A grainy shot of herself onstage in a little black dress, accepting an award, beaming again, but not as wide. Some joys aren’t as joyous as others.

It was more than possible — it was inevitable — to blame herself, her ambition, even though she’d never thought of herself as especially ambitious. But everyone has important moments, in any job, at any level of ambition. In the Supreme Court or a fourth-grade classroom, on an assembly line or a fishing boat, there are crucial days.

For Isabel the literary agent, this day was dominated by an auction she was running for a hotly anticipated second novel, whose author needed a lot of hand-holding, and whose bidders kept increasing their offers every half-hour, from mid-five figures to high-sixes in the course of the day. This lucrative 9-to-6 was followed by a 7 o’clock black-tie that included an honor for, and an interminable speech by, a different author of hers. So this frantic day, it featured a wardrobe change. And the evening portion was just as important work as the daytime; just because there was liquor and food and fancy dress didn’t mean it wasn’t work.

The nanny called a couple times during Isabel’s 16 hours at work, worrying that Nicky’s cold or flu or whatever was getting worse. Dave was away on a business trip, and Isabel didn’t want Lupe to be the one to go to the doctor with Nicky; the nanny’s English would be generously described as weak, and sometimes that mattered. So Isabel made an appointment for first thing the next morning. Anyone would’ve done the same thing.

Isabel returned home after midnight, exhausted. She thanked Lupe and sent her home in a taxi, and let her cocktail dress fall to the floor, and collapsed into bed.

She was awakened at dawn by the screaming. Nicky was burning up, 106. She rushed downstairs with the boy in her arms, and ran around the block, panting and desperate, until she found a taxi.  “Don’t worry, Sweetie,” she said. “We’ll be at the doctor’s in a minute.” The hospital was only a mile away.

The taxi peeled away from the curb, the eerie blue light washing over the dingy white garbage trucks, the Mexican kids swabbing down the sidewalks in front of all-night delis, the street-cart vendors positioning their pastries in front of office buildings, the joggers with reflective stripes down their shorts, the normal business of a city’s day starting, coming to life.

“Are we there yet?” Nicky asked, as he had so many times. From the back seat of the shiny SUV that was cleaned every week by the guys in the garage, on their way out to the weekend house in East Hampton, back when her life looked like something to be envied. He had said it on the way to visit Dave’s parents in Oyster Bay, or hers upstate in the Hudson Valley. While heading to Vermont, for a ski weekend; to Cape Cod, to visit friends; to the Bronx Zoo and the Brooklyn Aquarium, Yankee Stadium and Citi Field. It was something the little boy asked, all the time.

But this was the last time.

In the back of the moldy-smelling taxi she pushed the fever-damp hair off her son’s hot forehead. “Nearly,” she said. He shut his eyes, and then slipped silently into a coma, there on the slippery silver vinyl seat of the taxi.

An hour later, Nicky was dead. A supervirus, said the young doctor, who had been up all night, up for who knows how long, working; he was tired and frustrated, and perhaps not as tactful as he could’ve been.

At the end of the hall Isabel stops at the spotlit photograph, a small black-and-white in the center of a vast expanse of stark white matting. A little boy, her baby, laughing on a rocky beach, running out of gentle surf, holding a little toy hammer. Isabel reaches her hand to her lips, plants a kiss on her fingers, and transfers the kiss to the little boy. As she does every morning.

There was, the doctor added, almost nothing she could’ve done. Almost.

Our authors are two people you should be taking to the beach with you this summer. Chris Pavone is the author of “The Expats,” the New York Times best-selling thriller with more satisfying twists than the Pacific Coast Highway. Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of “The Green Shore,” one of 2012′s most anticipated debut novels, a beautiful family drama that is set during another Greek crisis — the 1967 military coup.

To read the stories, just follow the links below:

“Megaphone” by Natalie Bakopoulos

“Almost” by Chris Pavone

What this “Frankenstein” isn’t is a replication of the source text with the addition of a lot of digital doohickeys like sound effects and illustrations that animate when tapped. The app is all about the text, even if it is beautifully framed by period art and anatomical illustrations. The reader is presented with a screenful of narration and then offered one or more responses to it. The preferred response, when tapped, delivers up another screen of text. (In an absurdly pleasing visual touch, these appear as sheets of paper fasted together by straight pins.) According to the press materials, the reader’s responses will shape the way the narrative is presented, although not to the degree of substantively changing the plot.

This is an important point. The pleasure of storytelling lies in the dynamic between the surprising and the inevitable. The reader wants to feel the story is going somewhere, that its events follow from each other in meaningful, but not too obvious ways. When a story can go anywhere, it feels meaningless. In Mary Shelley’s novella, which is saturated with the Western tradition of the tragedy, Viktor Frankenstein’s character is such that he must create a monster, and the monster’s body is such that he can never belong among human beings however much he yearns to. A “Frankenstein” that ended with either misfit finding a comfortable place in the world would be a travesty.

But that doesn’t mean the reader doesn’t long for the story to unfold otherwise; that’s the nature of tragedy. The great insight that writer Dave Morris brings to this adaptation of the novel is that while a reader cannot significantly change the outcome of the story, the interactive element can change the shading and flavor of the tale. It can be mournful and reflective or action-packed. The creature and his creator can show greater or lesser ambivalence about their own behaviors. The ambiguity of both figures is baked into Mary Shelley’s novella, and while Morris has nearly doubled the word count of the original, this mostly amounts to playing up or down what’s already there.

Morris — a novelist who has written graphic novels, games and, yes, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories for kids — has changed the original text in other ways, as well. (Let’s take a moment here to point out to all future narrative app developers that hiring a real writer who actually knows what he or she is doing is totally worth it.) He’s moved the setting to revolutionary France, a choice that shows shrewd understanding of the idealistic political climate that affected Shelley’s thinking; the new Republic is its own kind of Frankenstein’s monster. He’s also eliminated much of the 19th-century framing of the tale and converted it into two present-tense narrations. One is Frankenstein’s dialogue with either himself or a (possibly imaginary) companion. The other is a second-person account of the monster’s first weeks of life as it spies on a family of dispossessed French nobility and has the chance to observe the loving relationships it can never enjoy itself.

Morris presents the reader with choices I’ve not encountered in other interactive fictions. Is humanity mostly good, or mostly evil? Does the most recent development make you (the monster) feel hope or despair? Is the revolution the dawn of a brave new world or a descent into chaos and barbarity? While I’m usually skeptical that present-tense narration increases the “immediacy” of a story, in this case, it really does work, particularly in the sections concerning the monster. Depending on your own outlook, you may urge him to keep trying to connect with humanity, or promptly forward him on to homicidal rage.

In either case, the narrative is shaped not by the reader deciding to turn left or right, to go down into the cellar or to get out of the house — the usual actions offered on the choose-your-own menu. Instead, the options have more to do with personality and interpretation, beliefs and ideas. As a result of the reader’s choices, the characters seem more like him- or herself, with a concurrent ratcheting up of emotional investment. To my surprise, I found myself more moved by this adaptation of the Shelley novel than I have been by the source text. (Although the app does include the original if you want to compare and contrast.) This is the only interactive fiction I’ve ever read with that quintessential, old-fashioned readerly avidity: the hunger to know what happens next. Of course, I already knew, but that didn’t matter at all.