Frankenstein Audiobook, Free

Yes. Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818, and the copyright expired long ago, so the full text is free on Project Gutenberg for anyone to read or listen to. LoudReader has it built into the free catalog already, no file to hunt down. You can hear a sample of the opening framing letters on the Frankenstein catalog page before you open the app.

It sounds like a computer reading, clearly and evenly, not like a horror-radio production. LoudReader's narration is a synthetic voice, generated on your device with natural offline voices, and it reads the ship captain's letters, Victor's confession, and the creature's own eloquent account in the same voice, rather than switching cast for each. It won't build dread the way a full-cast audio drama would. What it does is get the whole nested, epistolary structure of the novel read out loud, start to finish, at no cost.

1. Download LoudReader from the App Store on your iPhone or Mac. Free, no account.
2. Open the built-in Project Gutenberg catalog and search the title, or go straight to the Frankenstein page to hear the sample first.
3. Tap the book. It downloads once, then plays offline after that.
4. Press play. LoudReader remembers your exact place every time.

Free listening on Frankenstein is unlimited, cover to cover. Premium adds playback speed from 0.3x to 3.0x, a sleep timer, and every other voice in the app, none of it required to finish the book.

Around 8.5 hours, based on the novel's roughly 74,800 words. That's a word-count estimate, not a measured recording time, the same figure shown on the book's own catalog page. It's one of the shorter classics here, easy to finish in a handful of evenings.

For more free horror and gothic classics like this one, the built-in catalog is browsable by genre, and the case for it is laid out in the best audiobook app for classics.