Saadawi's novel names Shelley's in its title and rebuilds it in occupied Baghdad. A junk dealer collects body parts from bomb sites and stitches them into one corpse so that the pieces can be buried whole; the thing gets up and begins killing. The transposition sharpens the original's question. Shelley's creature is abandoned by one man; Saadawi's is assembled from victims of many different attacks, so when it takes revenge on behalf of its parts it runs out of legitimate targets and starts killing to replace its own decaying limbs. The monster made by violence becomes the engine of more.