Counterfactuals and the Tumblr Aesthetic: Allegories of Reading in <em>Frankenstein</em> and <em>The Locked Tomb</em>

Can Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) help us theorize how digital media cultures figure in the contemporary novel? Reading Tamsyn Muir’s queer science horror series The Locked Tomb through an interpretive framework derived from Shelley’s masterpiece, this article demonstrates that Muir modernizes allegories of reading of the sort upon which Frankenstein depends. Separated by centuries, Muir and Shelley share a preoccupation with alternative, counter-cultural, and significantly counterfactual processes of reading and otherwise consuming media. They use readerly characters to model such processes and articulate them to actual readers, whom they guide through curated multimedia archives that recall the eclectic environments of open world games. Their bibliographic encounters draw on a long tradition of inspiring readerly quests and have recently been reborn in a ‘Tumblr aesthetic’ that reflects and attracts media juxtapositions characteristic of that online platform: in 2023, The Locked Tomb and Frankenstein were among the most referenced books on Tumblr. Working in a genre Shelley helped found, Muir uses her symbolic, magical readers, or ‘Lyctors,’ as she terms them, to allegorize three main methods of digital preservation: reproduction, emulation, and migration. Muir’s preoccupation with media manifests in a story world steeped in readers guarding specific media, rendering The Locked Tomb as, fundamentally, a series about reading in the novel conditions of the digital era.