Victor Frankenstein, the now infamous mad scientist, creator of reanimation, and star of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , is often imagined as a man in his late forties, using decades worth of knowledge and expertise to create his iconic monster. The real Victor Frankenstein, however, is merely a college student- a young, naive, and freshly independent college student. The idea of such a young man creating life and subsequently causing multiple murders because of it seems like a unique idea for a story, yet a college student committing a murder is the same plot of two other novels: Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and Donna Tartt's The Secret History . All three of these books deal with a similar story involving a college student committing (or indirectly causing, in Frankenstein's case) a murder of someone they know personally. The murderer proceeds to fall ill, isolate themselves, undergo serious mental torment over the guilt, feel the urge to confess, and even