Frankenstein
The first science fiction novel, and still among the most morally powerful. Shelley's creature doubles as the first SF robot, the first AI, and the first exploration of scientific hubris. She wrote it at nineteen.
Long stretches of Alpine and Arctic description frustrate readers who came for horror and got travelogue. Victor collapses into fevers whenever something goes wrong, one reader complaining “80% of this book is just Victor falling into months-long fevers” and another mocking that “he was like one of those freaking fainting goats.” Detractors find him not tragic but whiny and passive, narrating his suffering after the fact instead of acting. It is not scary by modern standards, so readers expecting dread report boredom, one snapping that “the biggest horror seems to be how badly it is written.” The nineteenth-century sentence length is a barrier, and the 1818 and 1831 texts differ enough that which edition you grab changes the book.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
