Season 11, Episode 239 Chicano Frankenstein with guest Daniel Olivas

This week we speak with Daniel Olivas, a lawyer with the California Department of Justice, who is also a novelist, poet, and playwright. His novel, Chicano Frankenstein, which published in March of this year, was an obvious book pick for Carrie because she loves Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The novel has been optioned by Universal Television, so fingers crossed on that.

Olivas’ reimagining of Shelley’s 1818 novel has an unnamed man as the narrator. He is a paralegal who has been reanimated from the corpse of a Mexican-American man, one of many such reanimated people (derogatively called “stitchers”) who are part of an effort to deal with the US’ labor crisis, but he struggles with his identity. How can a person have an identity if all knowledge of their family, their interests, their feelings, their thoughts have been stripped away? In addition to the idea of selfhood, the novel also explores the cruelty of politicians who pander to fear and racism, harming the people of their communities that one would expect them to protect.

Books Mentioned in this Episode:

1- Chicano Frankenstein by Daniel Olivas

2- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

3- The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande

4- Artificial Life After Frankenstein by Eileen M. Hunt

5- A 5 Star Read Recommended by Fellow Book Lover The Biblioholic @thebiblioholic_ - Dorothy Must Die series by Danielle Page

6- Leech by Hiron Ennes

7- Unwieldy Creatures by Addie Brook Tsai

8- Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

9- Deathless Divide (Dread Nation #2) by Justina Ireland

Movies mentioned in this episode:

1- Frankenstien (1931)

2- The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)