INTRODUCTION

Byron Preiss called asking for a contribution to one of his three “Ultimate” books. I had my choice of The Ultimate Dracula, The Ultimate Werewolf, or The Ultimate Frankenstein. I’d already done a long vampire story earlier in the year (the novella Midnight Mass) and had never found werewolves all that interesting, so I chose Frankie. My challenge was to come up with something fresh on the monster in the allotted 3,500 to 5,000 words. Another restriction was that the story had to be based on the movie version, not Mary Shelley’s original. (Thus the reference to the monster’s creator as Henry rather than Victor.)

As is my custom, I inverted expectations, turned tropes on their heads, and came up with an angle that delighted me. As I wrote the first line of “Dreams,” I already knew the last. It is also, you will note, a nice little exercise in dramatic irony.