This Halloween I’m hoping to see at least a few trick-or-treaters dressed as Frankenstein’s monster. After all, this year is the 200th since the publication of Mary Shelley’s great novel, which perhaps more than any other book has become the model of modern literary horror.

But while I might catch a glimpse of a few cylindrical heads with neck bolts of the sort that were standard movie and TV fare from Boris Karloff to Herman Munster, it’s unlikely I’ll see a particularly accurate rendering of Victor Frankenstein’s creation. Nor am I certain I would recognize it if it knocked on my door.

Shelley’s description of the being — whom Frankenstein often calls a fiend or daemon — is decidedly sparse. He is enormous; he has long, black hair; he is frightful to behold; and he stares at his creator with a “dull yellow eye.”

Her reticence to describe physically the horror at the heart of her tale was no oversight, though. While her story has most often been interpreted as a cautionary tale about the dangers of modern man’s hubris as he pushes the limits of scientific knowledge — and it certainly is that — it is also, more powerfully, a story about the failure to recognize the humanity of those who don’t look like us, and how that failure of sympathy itself engenders monsters.