THE WEST NEEDED A HERO. IT GOT A FRANKENSTEIN.
When a vampire plague known as the Pyre turns California's gold rush into a bloodbath, desperate miners don't send for a sheriff-they kidnap the grandson of Victor Frankenstein, drag him across an ocean and half a continent, and chain him in an underground laboratory to build them a monster army.
Victor Frankenstein has spent his entire life running from his grandfather's monstrous legacy. He's a man of London: gin stills, catastrophic experiments, and scientific disasters that tend to end in property damage and public humiliation. He is emphatically not a man of the American frontier, of sun-scorched dust and desperate gold hunters and blood-drinking things that stalk the darkness by moonlight. But chained to a workbench deep beneath the California desert, with a cackling mad scientist as his unwanted laboratory partner and a ruthless, terrifyingly clever woman holding all the keys to his cell, Victor's opinions on the matter count for precisely nothing.
All he wants is to escape, board the next ship back to England, and spend the rest of his life pretending none of this ever happened. The Pyre, however, isn't waiting for Victor to make up his mind. It's spreading-town by town, body by body-and the creatures it leaves in its wake are getting bolder, hungrier, and far harder to kill. Victor may be the only thing standing between the lawless frontier and total undead annihilation.
He never wanted to be a monster maker. The monsters never asked.