Tag: Chicano Frankenstein

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Here we are, back at the confluence of Latine Heritage Month and spooky season. I try to read at least a few books that fall into both categories around this time of year—something spooky or marginally horror-adjacent (because you know me, I can barely do full-on horror). Chicano Frankenstein isn’t horror by any means, but I was intrigued by its Frankenstein-inspired premise. Unfortunately, this novel felt more dead than its reanimated protagonist.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Chicano Frankenstein – Daniel Olivas

In a near-future United States, reanimated people are the hot-button issue. As the president decries these “stitchers” who are stealing jobs from living Americans, an unnamed, reanimated paralegal navigates this hostile landscape. As the stigma against him increases and his social situation becomes more dire, he becomes more desperate than ever to uncover something he’s been searching for all his life: his history before he was brought back to life.

TW/CW: racism, discrimination (fictional), xenophobia, medical content, murder, hate crime, sexual content, descriptions of injury/car accident (past)

I’ll get this out of the way: I wanted to enjoy Chicano Frankenstein, but I really didn’t. But as fun as indulging the righteous haterism within me is, I do try and make an effort to at least find a few positive elements about books that I don’t like. Thankfully, Chicano Frankenstein made that easy. Although most of the novel was a slog, Olivas’s worldbuilding was excellent. He goes into exhaustive detail about the history of reanimation technology, how it’s affected legislation and the daily life of Americans, the stigmas surrounding it, and how it has affected politics. It’s a pretty obvious satire of the anti-immigration rhetoric that’s run rampant in the U.S. for centuries, and it’s effective as a satire. The integration of news segments, transcripts from the Oval Office, and all of the discussions about the midterms made this feel like it could easily be a hot-button issue the day after tomorrow. The President—who I imagined as very Marjorie Taylor-Green-esque, basically a genderbent Trump—felt appropriately beyond bigoted, and the bits of her flagrantly insulting her cabinet were funny…until I remembered that this is normal in the White House now. I appreciated the nods (obvious as they were) to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and even though this novel is thematically different, I enjoyed all the tips of the hat to the source material.

Olivas has a very detached narrative style for Chicano Frankenstein, which was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it suited the protagonist, who is only referred to as “the man.” I liked that detachment since it made so much sense for the character, and it gave it an interesting stylistic bent—it reminded me a lot of Ole Munch from Fargo, strangely. A man is grateful, etc. Olivas employs a lot of short, choppy sentences, which worked for the man’s one-track mind. But while that detachment worked for the man, the same detachment was glossed over the entire novel, which gave me little reason to care for everybody else. Even when the POV switched, that same style carried over, which didn’t make much sense to apply to everybody else. When the novel should’ve been right at the heart of the human side of the reanimation issue, I felt about as omniscient as a satellite watching from space: I just felt miles of distance between myself and the characters when I really shouldn’t have.

Learning that Daniel Olivas is mainly a short story/novella writer made a lot of sense. Chicano Frankenstein is just shy of the 200-page mark, but even then, it felt like Olivas was trying to inflate the page length to make Chicano Frankenstein feel like a full-length novel. That isn’t always a problem in and of itself, but it was just so obvious; I’ll get back to this later, but you’ve got entire passages of characters explaining landmarks and places like they’re reading straight from TripAdvisor reviews on too many occasions. The man finds a picture book in his old belongings—intriguing glimpse into his past life, right?—but then Olivas proceeds to paste in the entirety of said picture book into the narrative. Chicano Frankenstein would’ve been so much more effective as a novella, but as it is right now, Olivas just added so many erroneous elements that had no business clogging up the narrative.

Unfortunately, that mixed bag of Olivas’s sparse prose had no positives when it came to the dialogue. I left Chicano Frankenstein wondering when the last time that Olivas had interacted with a real person was. The protagonist’s dry, unvarnished dialogue was understandable, because he was, in a way, born yesterday. Everybody else? There was no excuse for what was going on there. Everybody talked so damn stiffly, with a complete lack of natural speech rhythm. Characters would reference books, and the entire conversation would get derailed so they could point out facts about the book or the author, high school book report-style. There’s a whole fucking sequence where one of the protagonist’s sassy coworkers regurgitates factoids about this one museum like she’s a college tour guide reading off bullet points from a clipboard. It was ridiculous. It was just blatantly out of touch from how any real person speaks.

An extension of the issue of Chicano Frankenstein’s grating dialogue was that, in addition to Olivas not being able to write natural dialogue, he apparently also can’t write women to save his life. It got to a point where I had to brace myself whenever any female characters were introduced. Faustina was the main woman in the story, and although there was a smidge of potential with the classic Frankenstein dynamic with the love interest being the only one who sees past his monstrosity, there was no followup whatsoever. That’s mostly because Faustina only functioned as a sexy love interest with no depth or purpose beyond saying “hey guapo 😏” to the protagonist and cooking for him. I think the only reason that Faustina barely passes the sexy lamp test is that she serves to cook for the man and drive him places, which still puts her firmly in service to him at all times…even though SHE’S SUPPOSED TO BE A LAWYER. (My best friend suggested that she’s instead a “sexy Uber,” since she still retains mobility, but it’s all in service to the male protagonist.) With the other women, Olivas was clearly attempting to make them sassy and cool, or something, which crashed and burned with a combination of the already heinous dialogue and Olivas only seeming to understand women to the degree of sass vehicles who dispense catty but worldly dating advice. (The scene with Faustina and Grace at the bar was particularly awful. I wanted to take a bite out of my walls by the end.) Bottom line: Olivas needs to remember how real people talk, but also remember that women are autonomous beings that do more than cook, be sexy, and produce dating tips.

All in all, a scathing critique of our current moment that succeeded with its commentary and worldbuilding, but fell short on…well, everything else. Daniel A. Olivas knows how reanimated people work, but apparently not living, breathing people. 2 stars.

Chicano Frankenstein is a standalone, but Daniel Olivas is also the author of several novels, novellas, and short story collections, including The Book of Want, How to Date a Flying Mexican, Anywhere but L.A., and many others.

Today’s song:

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!