All this makes Roth’s latest novel, “The Plot Against America,” doubly surprising. The book’s premise — what happens to the Roth family of Newark, N.J., when Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election and America descends into an orgy of anti-Semitism — is an embrace of the catastrophic anxieties Roth once rebelled against. He envisions the kind of America where, like it or not, he is a Jew first. But equally unexpected is the novel’s credibility: By setting it in a wholly imaginary history, Roth has paradoxically managed to write his most believable book in years.

Roth’s feelings of persecution have been the engine of much of his fiction, and for his readers it’s always a complicated balancing act: Is the thrill of being swept up in his stormy wrath worth the suspension of common sense that’s often required? The tirade about the Monica Lewinsky scandal that kicks off “The Human Stain,” for example, has a certain Swiftian magnificence, but as a description of what happened in America in 1998 it is dead wrong. The nation was not caught up in a puritanical witch hunt; rather, Americans largely refused to be whipped into such a frenzy, in defiance of the best efforts of right-wingers and certain media figures. (Wallowing in a gleefully smutty gossip-fest about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s private lives is another matter — that’s still going on, to judge from the covers of supermarket tabloids.)

Sexual persecution is the specter that really winds Roth’s watch, but in an era of gay marriage and openly polyamorous households, it’s hard to find a situation in which a heterosexual male of conventional proclivities can feel truly ostracized as a result of his sexuality. As a result, Roth has had to contrive some pretty preposterous scenarios, populated by an assortment of straw-man oppressors, in order to maneuver his main characters into a position in which they can be unjustly tormented. You can see all the strings and gears here, as in “The Human Stain,” in which Coleman Silk is given a wife solely so that she can be hounded unto death by a university’s administration and thus provide sufficient justification for Silk’s foaming hatred of that administration.

With “The Plot Against America,” we’re asked to believe something far more dramatic: that our country could, under the right circumstances and under the influence of powerful demagogues, degenerate into hate-stoked rioting on the level of Nazi Germany’s notorious Kristallnacht. Yet — a dismal thought — this is more plausible than the propositions Roth has been presenting us with lately. Roth’s handling of the story is sober, considered and subdued, another surprise. Roth’s fire-and-brimstone eloquence has hypnotized many a reader who might, in a less persuasive fictional climate, reject the paranoid fantasies he concocts. Here, where the threat is real (however speculative the “history” may be), he has abandoned his fury.

For “The Plot Against America” is a book about fear. “Fear” is the very first word in it, and for Roth fear is the natural companion of love, the secondary subject of the novel. The book is a tribute to his parents, Herman and Bess, and the tender order and fierce integrity of the life they created for their two sons, Sandy and Philip, in mid-20th century Newark. Roth seems unaware of the vast and lively fictional genre of alternate history, but this novel belongs to the small subset of it that is less interested in the unfolding of global events than in the way those events affect the most intimate experiences of the people who live through them.

From the moment Lindbergh offers himself as a Republican candidate opposed to intervention in the war in Europe, he becomes the villain of the Roth household. This puts Herman at odds with such rich, assimilated Jews as Rabbi Bengelsdorf, a Newark macher renowned for his public speaking, horsemanship and “several books of inspirational poetry routinely given as gifts to bar mitzvah boys and newlyweds.” Bengelsdorf is a marvelous creation, part object lesson in the perils of collaboration and part meticulous parody of self-important men everywhere: “‘Newark has the best drinking water in the world,’ the rabbi said, and said it as he would say everything, with deep consideration.”

But while the desperate rabbis of Europe might have cooperated with the Nazis in hope of somehow lessening or managing the devastation awaiting their communities, Bengelsdorf is merely a fool. Like everyone else in the novel, he’s in thrall to a notion of America; the novel’s most ferocious battles ultimately boil down to a collision of contradictory Americas. For the rabbi and his “wealthy, urbane, self-assured” friends, America is their own success story, in which they, the tiny first generation of Jews to attend Ivy League colleges, “mingled with the non-Jews, whom they subsequently associated with in communal, political and business endeavors and who sometimes appeared to accept them as equals.”

To the Roths, America is the set of constitutional and governmental protections that allows them to live unmolested in Jewish neighborhoods. What they share with their neighbors is not a particularly Jewish culture but simply a blessed relief from the prejudice that, anywhere else, made them feel like outsiders. “It was work that identified and distinguished our neighbors for me far more than religion,” Roth writes — and there is a powerful sense that the neighborhood and family depictions here are largely autobiographical. “Nobody in the neighborhood had a beard or dressed in the antiquated Old World style or wore a skullcap either outside or in the houses.”

Philip and his family know they are Jews, and that this threatens to set them apart (early in the novel, Herman rejects a promotion that would require moving to a gentile neighborhood), but they identify as Americans. Philip, “steeped in an American English that sounded more like the language spoken in Altoona or Binghamton than like the dialects famously spoken across the Hudson,” revels in the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, and finds the bearded stranger who goes door-to-door collecting donations to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine bewildering. “We’d already had a homeland for three generations … Our homeland was America.”

Lindbergh’s presidency splits the Roth family. Bess’ sister, Evelyn, marries Rabbi Bengelsdorf, who is appointed by Lindbergh to direct the Office of American Absorption. They lure Philip’s older brother, Sandy, into an OAA program with the sinisterly wholesome title of Just Folks. Just Folks sends urban children to heartland farms for the summer, with the ostensible aim of “encouraging America’s religious and national minorities to become further incorporated into the larger society.” Sandy becomes a partisan of Evelyn’s view that “the greatest fear of a Jew like her brother-in-law was that his children might escape winding up as narrow-minded and frightened as he was.”

Sandy and the Bengelsdorfs are woefully mistaken about the ultimate ends of the OAA, but until its true nature emerges, they espouse many of the same ideas Roth himself has voiced. You could see “The Plot Against America” as an act of contrition, a concession allowing that the fears of his parents’ generation represented, if not a present reality, then at least a potential one. In other words, it can happen here. The Jews of Newark are always merely a step away from panic, dogged by “an atavistic sense of being undefended that had more to do with Kishinev and the pogroms of 1903 than with New Jersey 37 years later.” Previously, like Sandy, Roth called this paranoia. But in this novel, Newark’s Jews are not so terribly off the mark.

The young Philip Roth in “The Plot Against America” is a child who has soaked up the ambient fear around him and attached it to everything from the cellar (haunted, he thinks) to the cousin who returns from fighting with the Canadian army against Hitler minus a leg. He cherishes his stamp collection, which somehow comes to stand for all the American ideals he and his family are about to see shattered. (Later on, his mother will urge his father not to send a letter to the gossip columnist Walter Winchell, who has become the most outspoken opponent of the Lindbergh administration, because someone might intercept it. “Never. Not the U.S. Mail,” Herman replies.) Philip has a recurring nightmare that his series of stamps showing national parks have been overprinted with swastikas, and that the presidents’ faces have been replaced with Hitler’s.

Much of “The Plot Against America” consists of the child Philip’s relatively ordinary boyhood experiences — adventures with a mischievous friend, efforts to decipher the mysteries of the adult world, the slow revelation that his parents are mere human beings, and the trials of having to play with a geeky family friend, a boy to whom Philip will ultimately do a terrible wrong. The voice is an adult’s, but not intrusively so. And meanwhile, underneath it all, the hum of menace grows louder and louder, until the disaster stalking Philip’s America becomes indistinguishable from the routine disasters of growing up, and then suddenly eclipses them.

The novel’s hero is Herman Roth, an insurance salesman who lacks the killer instincts of his entrepreneurial brothers. This leaves him more vulnerable to the anti-Semitic machinations of the government, and sometimes the book feels like a defense of him to a younger version of Roth who mistakenly saw Herman as weak. The uncles and other Jewish businessmen in “The Plot Against America” crackle and leap from the page — the passages about them have the immediate feel of stories traded across the dining room table, full of rants and jokes and gestures, full of life. By contrast, the modest, industrious Herman might seem bland.

The nightmare of the Lindbergh presidency becomes, for Roth the novelist, a way of applying a brutal pressure to his father and mother, an experiment that reveals, in extremis, their true worth. At the moment of greatest crisis, each of them is called upon to act, and each shows the clarity of genuine courage, mobilized by their most deeply held ideals. “There were two kinds of strong men,” Roth writes, “those like Uncle Monty and Abe Steinham, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.”

But while “The Plot Against America” concedes (after a fashion; the book has a rather gratuitous “secret” revealed at the end) that the rise of a murderously anti-Semitic regime is possible, even in the U.S., it is not his Jewishness that spurs Herman Roth’s defiance of that regime, but his Americanness. Roth has not strayed so far from his old ways after all. To be Jews, for Herman and his friends, is “neither a mishap or a misfortune or an achievement to be ‘proud’ of.” It is rather “in the nature of things, as fundamental as having arteries and veins, and they never manifested the slightest desire to change it or deny it.” To insist on a place in this country no matter what the “nature of things” might be, this, for Herman Roth, and eventually for his son Philip, is to be American.

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.