Spots 
Victor Frankenstein begins his account in Geneva, detailing a family rooted in public service and high distinction. His father Alphonse rescues Caroline Beaufort from poverty, marrying her after her father's death. During a trip to Italy, the couple adopts Elizabeth Lavenza, presenting the gentle orphan to young Victor as a cherished gift and lifelong companion.
Growing up alongside Elizabeth and his close friend Henry Clerval, Victor turns his intellect toward natural philosophy. He becomes obsessed with the discarded theories of Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, seeking secret power over nature. A violent thunderstorm near Belrive destroys an old oak tree, redirecting his focus from ancient alchemy to modern electricity and science.
Grief strikes the Frankenstein home when Caroline contracts scarlet fever from Elizabeth and dies. Moving to the University of Ingolstadt, Victor encounters two contrasting professors. M. Krempe dismisses his alchemical reading as useless rubbish, while M. Waldman inspires him by framing modern chemistry as a tool to unlock nature's deepest secrets.
Obsessed with understanding life, Victor spends two years in relentless study, haunting slaughterhouses and dissecting corpses in charnel houses. His obsession yields a breakthrough when he discovers the exact mechanism needed to animate inanimate matter. Secluded in an isolated attic room, he gathers materials to construct a giant human figure, ignoring his health and family entirely.
On a dismal night in November, Victor infuses spark into his creation, only to instantly recoil from its dull yellow eyes and watery skin. Terror drives him to his bed chamber, where nightmares haunt his sleep before he flees into the streets of Ingolstadt. Meeting his arriving friend Henry Clerval, Victor collapses into a severe, months-long fever from nervous exhaustion.
Elizabeth sends a loving letter detailing home life in Geneva and describing Justine Moritz, a gentle servant beloved by the family. Nursing Victor back to health, Henry Clerval shifts his friend's studies toward Oriental languages to heal his fractured mind. A spring walking tour through the surrounding countryside briefly returns Victor to peace before news arrives from home.
Alphonse writes with terrible news: young William Frankenstein has been murdered in the woods outside Geneva. Rushing home, Victor finds the city gates locked and wanders near Mont Salève during a thunderstorm, where a flash of lightning reveals the giant creature lurking in the darkness. Victor instantly realizes his creation killed William, yet Justine Moritz is arrested after the boy's locket is found in her pocket.
Justine stands trial for William's murder despite her obvious innocence and gentle character. Pressured by her confessor and hopeless of acquittal, she falsely confesses to the crime in tears, leading directly to her execution. Victor watches the tragedy unfold in agonized silence, aware that speaking the truth about a monster made from corpses would sound like insanity.
Guilt transforms Victor's life into a nightmare of despair, made worse by Elizabeth's fading joy and his father's failing health. Fearing his creature may commit further atrocities against his remaining family, Victor leaves Geneva alone. He seeks refuge in the towering peaks and icy grandeur of the Valley of Chamounix, hoping nature will quiet his torment.
Climbing the Montanvert glacier alone, Victor meets his creature striding across the ice at superhuman speed. Filled with rage, Victor curses the monster and threatens violence, but the creature responds with measured eloquence. Demanding that Victor hear his narrative, the creature warns that ignoring his duty as creator will seal humanity's ruin, leading Victor into a remote ice hut.
The creature narrates his first moments of life, recalling a blinding surge of light, cold, and unrefined sensations in the forest near Ingolstadt. He learns to forage for berries, drink from streams, and light a fire abandoned by beggars. Human reactions quickly turn hostile when villagers stone and drive him away, forcing him to take refuge in a tiny hovel attached to a rural cottage.
Hidden inside his cramped hovel, the creature peers through a tiny chink in the wall to watch the De Lacey family. He notes their poverty, gentleness, and deep mutual affection between the blind father, Felix, and Agatha. Moved by their plight, he secretly cuts firewood and clears snow for them at night, beginning to learn their spoken words.
The arrival of Safie, a foreign woman loved by Felix, accelerates the creature's education as he listens to her language lessons. He masters speech and absorbs Volney's Ruins of Empires, gaining insight into social structure, property, and human history. Understanding human civilization leaves the creature deeply alienated, realizing he possesses no family, money, or recognizable human form.
The creature recounts how the De Lacey family lost their wealth and high status in Paris. Felix had helped Safie's father, a wealthy Turkish merchant unjustly condemned to death, escape from prison. The French government discovered the plot, imprisoned the elder De Lacey and Agatha, confiscated their fortune, and banished the family into impoverished exile.
Finding discarded copies of Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and The Sorrows of Werter, the creature compares himself to Adam and Satan. Reading Victor's laboratory journal confirms his unnatural origins and fills him with disgust. When he finally introduces himself to the blind elder De Lacey, Felix returns unexpectedly and brutally beats him away.
Enraged by the family's flight, the creature burns the De Lacey cottage to ashes and sets out for Geneva to find Victor. Along the journey, he rescues a young girl from drowning, only to be shot by her companion in reward. Reaching Geneva, he strangles William Frankenstein when the boy mentions his father's name, then plants the locket on Justine.
Concluding his tale, the creature demands that Victor fashion a female companion equal in ugliness so they may live isolated in South America. Victor initially refuses, horrified by the prospect of another monster, but relents when the creature vows total peace if complied with. Threatening destruction should Victor break his word, the creature vanishes into the mountain snows.
Back in Geneva, Victor procrastinates creating the female companion, haunted by dark anxiety. Alphonse proposes Victor marry Elizabeth, but Victor insists on traveling to England first to consult natural philosophers and gather necessary materials. Henry Clerval joins him on the journey, contrasting Victor's melancholy with buoyant excitement as they tour London and Oxford.
Leaving Clerval behind in Edinburgh, Victor travels north to the remote, barren Orkney Islands. He rents a dilapidated stone cottage on a desolate rock where he sets up a second laboratory. In total solitude, surrounded by crashing waves, he reluctantly begins assembling the flesh for a second living creature, plagued by growing moral dread.
Fearing the two creatures might multiply into a race that threatens humanity, Victor tears the half-finished female body to pieces in front of the creature. The creature swears revenge, issuing the chilling promise, "I shall be with you on your wedding-night." Victor rows out to sea, disposes of the body parts in the ocean, and washes ashore in Ireland, where he is promptly arrested.
Magistrate Kirwin shows Victor the corpse of Henry Clerval, strangled by monster hands on the Irish coast. Victor falls into two months of severe delirium, waking in a dungeon with only a compassionate magistrate and his arriving father Alphonse to help him. Acquitted for lack of evidence, Victor returns home to Switzerland, a physical and mental wreck.
Returning to Geneva, Victor receives a letter from Elizabeth offering to release him if he loves another. Reassuring her, Victor agrees to immediate marriage, mistakenly assuming the creature's threat applies strictly to his own life on the wedding night. After a joyful ceremony, the couple travels across Lake Geneva to an inn at Evian for their honeymoon.
While Victor patrols the inn's hallways armed with pistols, the creature sneaks into the bedroom and strangles Elizabeth. Returning to Geneva, Alphonse dies of apoplexy from sheer grief, leaving Victor completely stripped of loved ones. Victor reveals his secret to a local magistrate, who deems pursuit impossible, driving Victor to dedicate his remaining life to hunting the creature.
Victor pursues the creature across Mediterranean shores, Russian wilderness, and onto the frozen Arctic sea until rescued by Captain Walton's ship. Weakened by cold, Victor completes his tale, urging Walton to destroy the monster before dying. Walton later discovers the creature weeping over Victor's body, expressing deep remorse and vowing to burn himself to ash on a funeral pyre at the Pole.
Unchecked ambition and the rejection of creation unleash inescapable horror upon creator and creation alike.