[For the previous countdown post, click here.]

7. “’59 Frankenstein” (1996)

This vintage piece (first published in Partridge’s edited anthology It Came from the Drive-In) is a premiere example of the author’s love of 50’s-era drive-in movies and “the rockin’ rollin’ juvenile delinquent” horror of early Stephen King (e.g., Christine, “Sometimes They Come Back”). Riffing on the 1957 film I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, the story has an American-based Doctor Frankenstein create an amalgamated monster out of the body parts of high school football players who perished in a team bus accident. Things go south from the outset of the narrative: when the condescending doctor refuses to allow his monster to take a custom hot rod out for a spin, the teenage creation attacks him with a fireplace poker and tosses him down into the alligator pit below the basement laboratory. From here, the action cuts back and forth suspensefully between the doctor’s dire struggle and the creation’s encounters out on the town. While there is a definite grimness to the proceedings (no shortage of gator gore here), the story enchants with its sardonic wit and concludes with a perfectly ironic plot twist. A signature Partridge effort, whose subject matter and stylistic approach would identify its author even if there were no byline stitched below the title.