When being brilliant isn't enough: what Frankenstein costs Victor (2026)

Here's the number that reframes the whole novel: one man, one lifetime, five people in the ground— and he's supposed to be the genius of the story. We remember Victor Frankenstein as the man who built the monster. We forget he's the man who ends completely alone, dying in the Arctic ice while still chasing the thing he made. Frankenstein is not a warning against ambition. It's a warning against ambition that forgets the people— and in 2026, after Guillermo del Toro's film and two years of AI discourse, that's exactly why it reads like a story about the present.

• ✅Five deaths, all people closest to Victor. The cost of his ambition is counted in the people he loved, not in lab equipment.
• ✅The book's real question isn't what he built.It's what kind of person he became while building it.
• ✅“Brilliance without love” is the whole indictment in three words: all the genius in the world, no one to share it with.
• ✅The book is having a 2026 moment.The del Toro film and the “Frankenstein-of-X” idiom turned a 200-year-old novel into contemporary reality.

🔢 Count the losses

On the Saylia podcast, Leo counts the cost out loud, because the names land harder than the number:

The fiancée. The father. The best friend. The little brother. Plus the maid, hanged for a murder she didn't do. Five people. All gone.

Elizabeth, his bride, killed on their wedding night. His father, dead of grief. Henry Clerval, his warmest friend, murdered on a Scottish beach. William, his six-year-old brother, the first to die and the start of the whole chain. And Justine, hanged for William's murder while Victor stayed silent. Victor wins — he does the impossible thing nobody else could — and loses every relationship he had to get there. That's the whole book in one breath.

Brilliance without love. That's the whole indictment in three words. He's got the genius. He's got nobody.

🎬 Why Frankenstein is everywhere again in 2026

The book is having a genuine cultural moment. Guillermo del Toro's 2025 Frankenstein landed around 85% on Rotten Tomatoes with five Golden Globe nominations, and sent a new audience back to the novel. Meanwhile the word itself became a verb: somebody Frankensteins a slide deck together before a meeting; you Frankenstein a dating profile out of three exes' advice.

It became operating instructions for the present.

The best line about why the book reads this way comes from novelist Jeanette Winterson, in her introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition (surfaced via a top Goodreads review):

We are the first generations to read it not as gothic horror but as contemporary reality.

🪞 The version of this you've actually seen

The loud version is the founder shipping some world-changing AI. But the book's move is usually closer to home. On the podcast, Leo draws the scene most of us recognize:

Posts the big win photo from the all-hands Friday, the thread thanking the team. Sleeping in the office two months. The divorce papers have sat on the kitchen counter since March. Nobody at work knows. Everybody at home stopped asking.

From the outside, that's the win — the photo, the applause. From the inside, it's just Victor: brilliance without love, the same trade two hundred years apart. The book has been holding up that mirror the whole time; del Toro just made a new generation look into it.

🧭 The bottom line, four episodes in

After tracing how a monster gets made, how loneliness drives the whole story, and why abandonment is the real sin, the series lands on the synthesis Leo states plainly:

It's not a warning against ambition. It's a warning against ambition that forgets the people. Two hundred years on, that's still the conversation.

And then the quiet line the series planted in its first episode and pays off in its last: mind the spark.The thing you build will demand everything you've got. Make sure there's still someone in the room when you finish. The novel reads in an afternoon.