The rallying cry against big publishers is that new artists can't be nourished by an industry obsessed with bestsellers. But before grabbing our pitchforks and torching the House of Bertelsmann, consider the inexplicable appearance of "A Monster's Notes" by a poet named Laurie Sheck. Gorgeously printed by New York's premier publishing house, here is a baffling 500-page book about Frankenstein's creation that defies description and shreds any expectations you might have for a novel...This is indeed a monstrous collection of notes. Instead of anything resembling a plot, we get thousands of little scraps stitched together: bits of letters, journal entries, newspaper clippings, marginalia, interviews, dreams, lists, Web pages, lesson plans and translated passages, full of additions and words x'd out. What's more, it's a fire hose of erudition that sprays out allusions to 3,000 years of history, science, philosophy and literature, the kind of novel that keeps you chained to Wikipedia unless you're on a first-name basis with Boethius, Cao Xuequin, Dante, Marco Polo, Locke, Diogenes, Maimonides and especially the Romantic poets, along with their parents, lovers, children and pets. I'm sure somewhere there's a reader smart enough (or dishonest enough) to enjoy this novel in all its rich allusiveness, but I spent the entire ordeal lurching along about 50 IQ points behind. Having survived the encounter, though, I'm eager to brag about it, and even if "The Monster's Notes" is nothing you want to experience firsthand, it's a remarkable creation, a baroque opera of grief, laced with lines of haunting beauty and profundity...Sheck imagines that Frankenstein's monster is still alive in the early 21st century, living in a decrepit building in New York, trying to make sense of his lonely existence, which means he's a pretty typical New Yorker. – Reviewed in the Washington Post