Even Hesperus has some "eh" books. Finished one such a couple of days ago, namely Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov. It is a novella set close to a decade after the Russian Revolution at a time when the newly minted Communists were all for singing at dawn and breaking up the larger apartments into more equitable "cubbies." The main character is a well-to-do doctor/mad scientist (oh I forgot to mention, this falls in the satiric sci-fi genre) who takes home a mongrel from the streets, fattens him up and transplants the pituitary gland and gonads of a common criminal. (N0, this isn't heading into the successful realms of The Charlatan.)
Neither is it as memorable as Frankenstein because the manifest political message. Which is, I decipher, the Russian classes were either 1) oblivious to the masses but overlaying a "culture" on the country or 2) so downtrodden as to become near-dogs themselves ... scrounging for food or attacking. Being written in the mid 1920's, the medicinal/psychiatric side effects lack the more frightening parodies that could be expressed post-DNA and more organ transplant operations. The story ends with the doctor restoring the doggie-ness to the "patient," implying the author's belief in the comfortable, if imperfect known world.
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