Frankenstein's Daughter/Elliott Murphy

I crossed the forest/With the daughter of Frankenstein, Elliott Murphy sings in Frankenstein's daughter, from his 2008 album Notes From The Underground. She was so pretty/And I could see/When your daddy's a monster/It's just not so easy. No doubt Murphy was inspired by Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein when he wrote the song, though it's possible that such cinematic incarnations as The Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, Frankenstein's Daughter, and yes, even Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter may have crossed his mind. "That title was from a long line of Frankenstein's relatives," Murphy said in an interview with the web site Dave's On Tour. "The amazing thing about Frankenstein and Dracula is that the two legendary monster figures were created the same rainy night in a little chateau outside of Geneva, Switzerland. Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley were there and the thought was for everybody to write a monster or horror book. Shelley's future wife Mary, who was his mistress at the time, wrote Frankenstein. A friend of Lord Byron's, physician John Polidori, was inspired by fragments of a story Lord Byron wrote about vampire legends. He wrote a book, called The Vampyre, although other vampire books written years later, including Bram Stoker's Dracula, became more famous. With my song, I tried to carry on a tradition that's worth following." The album takes its title from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1864 novel, and as Murphy's website reveals, he is himself the author of multiple short story collections, the most recent being Café Notes (Hachette), as well as two novels, Cold And Electric and the neo-western Poetic Justice (Hachette.) A new novel, Tramps, is expected in 2009.