With Hallow E’en fast approaching, of course I was going to hear Bobby “Boris” Pickett on the radio as I was driving to work this morning:
I was working in the lab, late one night
When my eyes beheld an eerie sight
For my monster from his slab, began to rise
And suddenly to my surprise
He did the mash, he did the monster mash
The monster mash, it was a graveyard smash
He did the mash, it caught on in a flash
He did the mash, he did the monster mash
From my laboratory in the castle east……
Great literature and poetry? Probably not! But it has been and will continue to be great fun.
By now the annual Hallow E’en frolic and festivities have become well choreographed and even predictable, but still they are a great annual diversion!
Of course this year we have COVID-19 in the spooky mix and things are not working out as they usually might or would. So perhaps this would be a good time to think back 200 years to the origin of many of today’s spooky traditions: 18-year old author Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Immerse yourself just a bit in Mary Shelley’s personal life. You will quickly realize that her life was not all “beer and skittles” as the Brits would say. She had many devastating experiences and many tragedies in her young life: Mary’s own mother died very painfully ten days after Mary’s birth; young Mary Shelley had and lost, multiple children while she was a teenager and into her early 20s. Mary’s lover and later her husband, the famous poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned at the relatively young age of 29. And Percy Bysshe Shelley too had gone through a very trying and tempestuous personal life.
You can immerse yourself now in Mary Shelley’s life with a new educational game very imaginatively developed by Hatch Escapes. The game is called “Mother of Frankenstein”:
https://www.motheroffrankenstein.com/
A reviewer exclaims: “Is this a Role Playing Game? Is this a Puzzle? Is it a Parlor Game? Or is it an Escape Room? This Game Is All Four and More.”
This is how the game begins:
You have just received “The Shelley Volumes,” a collection of hollowed-out books left by Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein) to her son, Florence. In the first volume, you find a message from Mary:
What could be more appropriate? A message from beyond the grave. A message from the author of the fabled “Frankenstein” story. A mysterious family legacy. A challenge and a mystery that begs to be resolved.
This game could be just the thing to keep you and your family engrossed during an at-home Hallow E’en weekend. And probably longer! And that’s just the beginning of the possibilities. This could lead to a whole new immersive educational experience into the leading literary figures of the English nineteenth century. Many of them were involved with and close to Mary Shelley and her husband. It is experiences like this that could be life-altering for your teenagers bored by COVID-19 enforced stays at home and away from their normal pursuits.
