Right. In fact, the entire question of this thread is missing the point, in a way: as I understand it, Frankenstein’s Monster was specifically conceived to be a new kind of monster.
The novel grew from a “game” of sorts that Mary Shelley and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, played while visiting with Lord Byron and another writer, John Polidori, at a villa in Switzerland during an unusually cold, rainy vacation. (In fact, it turns out the weather was uniquely horrible because the volcanic eruption of Tambora had thrown ash into the atmosphere and blocked a lot of sunlight. That was the famous “year without a summer.”) See the Wikipedia summary for more details.
Confined inside by the weather, the vacationers read ghost stories, and apparently it was Byron who proposed they should each write a new tale of the supernatural.
My understanding of this part of the story is that either the challenge was specifically to create something new, or else Mary Shelley, keenly aware that she was regarded as the minor player among the literary heavyweights present, specifically set out to create something new and different. Frankenstein’s monster is intentionally not one of the old tried-and-true monsters, but a new idea (or as new as any literary concept can be, anyway).
At any rate, the monster breaks with the nearly universal tradition of being something before mankind’s coming or something created by a god to test or oppose mankind, and instead is something we have brought on ourselves, using the new and questionable practices of Science (which must be pronounced as if capitalized in this usage!) but the entire project is fatally flawed by the ancient Greek concept of hubris.
It was a brilliant conception that brought together many of the fears of the day (surgery was crude, dismemberment was much more common, science was poorly understood by the general public, there was a not-unrealistic fear of being buried alive, and in general, society could feel that change was coming, not all of it controlled or intended). The monster, of course, is no more subject to control than Science, society, or history were turning out to be.
If the game was a competition, Mary Shelley won it hands down, as it is her new creation that is remembered vividly and is indelibly part of our pantheon of fears even to this day. Frankenstein’s lonely monster, bitter at his creator’s betrayal, lurks in the Arctic cold at the end of the book, but he lurks deep down in today’s stem cell debate too.
Interestingly, the other great concept (although not so new) to spring from that “game” is the association of vampires in the public mind with romance and sexiness. Prior to this point, Romanian folklore had conceived of vampires as animated corpses that sucked blood, but they were decaying and mindless, much like our current conception of zombies.
Byron’s effort in the “game” was only a fragment, but based on the Balkan vampire stories. One of the other guests present, John Polidori, expanded that fragment into The Vampyre, explicitly romanticizing the vampire as a figure of mystery and swoon-inducing sexual tension. This had a huge impact in the fiction of the day, and remains with us still, leading eventually, but directly, to horrors like the Twilight series.
What is?