Quick Take
- Narration: Mary Jane Wells won an AudioFile Earphones Award for this performance, and it is deserved, her range of character voices, accents, and tonal shifts is one of the production’s primary pleasures.
- Themes: Identity assembled from fragments, the violence embedded in scientific curiosity, what it means to be created rather than born
- Mood: Deliriously inventive and historically playful, with darker currents running beneath the comedy
- Verdict: A wildly specific Christopher Moore novel that rewards fans of his most ambitious work and offers Wells’s narration as a significant added value.
Christopher Moore is the kind of novelist who requires a particular form of trust from his reader. His premises sound like they should not work. A vampire who works in a San Francisco coffee shop. A novel from the perspective of Jesus’s childhood best friend. An undead woman fished out of a Viennese canal in 1911 by Gustav Klimt. The trust required is that Moore is not just throwing ideas at the wall: he is using the absurdist premise to get at something he could not approach through realism. With Anima Rising, I settled into that trust about forty minutes in, on a Sunday morning when I had nothing more pressing than a pot of coffee and the particular pleasure of letting a novel take me somewhere completely unexpected.
Mary Jane Wells earned an AudioFile Magazine Earphones Award for her narration here, and that context is worth establishing upfront because this is a production where the narrator is genuinely doing significant creative work. Anima Rising is set in early twentieth century Vienna, involves multiple European accents, visits Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung as actual characters, and requires the narrator to hold comic and genuinely unsettling registers simultaneously. Wells does all of this.
Vienna, 1911, and the Limits of Origin Stories
The premise, as one reviewer accurately describes it, is a reimagining of the Bride of Frankenstein story set in Europe one hundred years after the original events. Judith, the woman Klimt pulls from the Danube, cannot remember who she is or how she came to be in the canal. What she gradually recalls is that she was stranded in the Arctic by someone named Victor Frankenstein and has apparently visited the Underworld. The presence of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung as characters who assist in unpacking Judith’s recovered memories is one of the novel’s best structural choices: both men had professional investments in the question of what we are made of, and both are thoroughly convinced they understand Judith in ways the novel methodically dismantles.
Reviewer Michael J notes that Moore employs excellent research as a foundation and that he laughed frequently throughout, finding it genuinely entertaining. Reviewer Bu Hao, offering a more measured four stars, identifies it as a slow starter compared to Moore’s best work, specifically his vampire and Pine Cove trilogies. That calibration is useful for listeners coming from different points in the Moore catalog.
What Mary Jane Wells Does With Early Twentieth Century Vienna
The geographical and temporal setting creates specific demands for the narrator. Wells navigates the period’s social register, the Viennese cultural milieu, the multiple national characters who enter the story, and the very particular challenge of Geoff, described in the synopsis as a giant croissant-eating devil dog of the North. A performance that plays this character for broad comedy would collapse the tonal balance Moore has carefully constructed. Wells treats Geoff with a specific kind of comedic gravity that keeps the absurdity legible without tipping into farce.
The AudioFile Earphones Award is noted in the synopsis itself, which is a relatively unusual decision in the audiobook marketing copy, but it reflects something true about this production: Wells is not providing a service to the text, she is co-creating the listening experience. Her tonal shifts are described as complementing the story’s pace and humor, and the word complementing understates the degree to which her choices shape how the novel’s more unsettling passages land.
The Bride of Frankenstein Premise and What Moore Does With It
The novel’s stated comparisons are to Poor Things and Bride of Frankenstein, and both point toward something real about its concerns. All three are interested in women who have been created, violated, or recovered by men who believe their scientific or artistic interest justifies their intervention. Moore handles this with more lightness than Alasdair Gray but with a similar underlying attention to what the Frankenstein myth is actually about. The question of who owns a created woman, and what she owes her creators, is not absent from Anima Rising. It is simply wearing a comedy costume, which is generally how Moore does his best work.
Who Should Listen, Who Should Skip
Listen if you have read and enjoyed other Christopher Moore novels and want to hear him operating with full historical research, a strong audiobook production, and an Earphones Award-winning narrator. This is not Moore’s funniest book, as Reviewer Bu Hao correctly notes, but it may be his most conceptually ambitious. Listen if gothic literary pastiche and the specific pleasures of Klimt-era Vienna as a setting appeal to you.
Skip if you are new to Moore and want to start with his most immediately accessible work: the Pine Cove and vampire trilogies are funnier per page and have simpler structural demands. Also skip if the Bride of Frankenstein mythology holds no appeal as a subject, because the novel is thoroughly committed to its source material in ways that reward prior familiarity.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Anima Rising a standalone novel or part of a series?
Anima Rising is a standalone novel. It draws on the Frankenstein mythology but does not require familiarity with any prior Christopher Moore works. It does not belong to any of Moore’s established series, such as the Pine Cove trilogy or the vampire novels.
How significant is Mary Jane Wells’s AudioFile Earphones Award win for assessing the listening experience?
Very significant. The Earphones Award specifically recognizes outstanding audio performance, and Wells’s work here is genuinely exceptional rather than merely competent. The novel’s Vienna setting, its multiple historical characters with distinct registers, and its tonal range make this a demanding narration job, and the award reflects that she met those demands at a high level.
Does this book require familiarity with Frankenstein, Klimt, Freud, or Jung to be fully enjoyed?
No prior knowledge is required, but all four add texture to the experience. Frankenstein familiarity allows you to appreciate how Moore inverts the source mythology. Awareness of Klimt’s actual paintings, particularly his Judith canvases, deepens the naming choice. Freud and Jung are written as recognizable archetypes rather than requiring academic knowledge. Moore provides enough context for newcomers throughout.
Is this novel more funny or more dark in its overall register?
Predominantly funny, but with consistently present dark currents. Reviewer Bu Hao describes it as less funny than Moore’s vampire work, which is accurate for comparative purposes. The horror elements, including Judith’s fragmented Arctic memories and the nature of her creation, are handled with comedic framing but are not entirely defused by it. Think of the tone as a dark comedy where the darkness has genuine weight.
