HIS69-217 Man-Made Stud

FOREWORD

The well publicized Sexual Revolution of the sixties was waged and (according to one’s point of view) won with hardly a shot fired or a soldier killed, but this is not to say that it was a peaceful revolution or that it did not have its fair share of victims. It has left in its wake a generation gap wider and more divisive than ever, severing all common ground between a generation that was trained to feel secretive and guilty about sex and a generation that openly and matter-of-factly enjoys sex, both as recreation and as a display of affection.

Those on the one side of the gap look with horror or, sometimes, with envy upon youngsters cavorting publicly in the nude and dabbling in homosexuality, heterosexuality, and all the possible permutations in between. Those on the other side simply cannot understand why anyone ever made such a big deal out of the whole thing.

In this unusual tale, Rex Montgomery has updated the time-honored horror fantasy Frankenstein and turned it into a relevant and contemporary story of the lengths to which one man might go to overcome the guilt and embarrassment that was always thought to be an integral part of the sex act before the revolution.

Robert von Frankenstein is a young, hip, and openly gay American medical student, a classic product of the Sexual Revolution. When he and his lover, Carl Ritterscamp, journey to Austria in search of his roots, they meet Robert’s Uncle Victor, the present-day custodian of the crumbling Castle Frankenstein, site of the infamous creation of yore. Victor is a student of the old school of sex, and his uncontrollable attraction to those of the same sex is a matter of extreme humiliation to him.

Together Robert and Victor set out to duplicate and modernize the work of their ancestor, and they create an artificial human more perfect and beautiful than any man born of woman who ever walked the earth. But is he a man, to be treated with deference and respect, as Robert believes? Or is he an object, a piece of property, created for the purpose of fulfilling one’s every sexual desire and for no other purpose, as Victor intended?

Although Montgomery has couched his questions in an entertaining and occasionally chilling fantasy format, the questions he raises are as pertinent as tomorrow’s headlines, and they are the kind of questions that we must each of us ask as we question which side of the generation gap the revolution has left us on.