Yes it's that time of year again and, satirical wisdoms of Shakespeare's fool aside, it is just jolly well tipping down. The sight of all that wet stuff has brought to mind that splendidly climactic chapter of Shelley's Frankenstein, where the unhappy Victor discovers the body of his dear wife, 'the murdeous mark of the fiend's grasp' still on her neck.
Not only that, but the grim discovery is followed by a classic Gothic tableau: Victor explains how...
'I felt a kind of panic on seeing the pale yellow light of the moon illuminate the chamber. The shutters had been thrown back; and, with a sensation of horror not to be described, I saw at the open window a figure the most hideous and abhorred. A grin was on the face of the monster; he seemed to jeer, as with his fiendish finger he pointed toward the corpse of my wife.'
Such melodrama in his narrative! A semantic field of death and horror: 'hideous; abhorred; monster; fiendish; corpse'. The moon echoes the notes of decay and death in its sickly 'pale yellow light'. And the creature is depicted in the most horrid, leering demoniacal terms:' grin, jeer, fiendish'.
So what about the rain then? Oh yes... he goes on to say that 'the wind was unfavourable, and the rain fell in torrents.' Knew it was in there somewhere!
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