Kim's Reviews > This Dark Endeavor

This atmospheric melodrama introduces us to the teenage Victor Frankenstein, who lives with his well-to-do family in the old Frankenstein chateau outside of Geneva. Exploring the house one day, Victor and his twin brother Konrad and their beautiful cousin Elizabeth accidentally stumble on a secret passage from the library, which leads down to an ancient room full of old books devoted to alchemy. Their father warns them to stay away from the Dark Library, but when Konrad falls ill and the doctors can't help him, Victor is determined to seek a cure for his brother himself. He and Elizabeth and a neighbor Henry return to the forbidden library, and there find a book that promises the Elixer of Life. They begin a dangerous quest with the assistance of the reclusive Polidori who had practiced alchemy in the past and nearly been hanged for it, and it quickly becomes a race not only for Konrad's life but for their own. An imaginative and thought-provoking look into how the seeds might have been sown in the teen Frankenstein who would become the adult in Mary Shelley's classic.