The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein Books in Order

Kenneth Oppel's The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein books take a familiar literary name and move backward, into the years before the monster and before the lab. Instead of retelling Mary Shelley's novel, the series asks what sort of teenager Victor might have been, and what early desires and fears could grow into the man readers already know is headed for trouble.

The answer is not subtle, and that is part of the fun.

These books follow Victor as a boy living at Chateau Frankenstein near Geneva with his twin brother Konrad, their cousin Elizabeth, and their friend Henry Clerval. On the surface, the setup has the shape of a historical adventure. There are lessons, fencing, hidden passages, mountain scenery, and a grand house full of secrets. But that calm does not last. In This Dark Endeavor, illness and fear send Victor into the forbidden Dark Library, where alchemy stops looking like a dusty curiosity and starts feeling like power.

What makes the series work is that Oppel does not turn Victor into a simple villain-in-training. He is jealous, proud, loving, impulsive, and often hard to trust, sometimes even in his own narration. He wants to save people. He also wants to win. Those two drives keep tangling together, especially where Konrad and Elizabeth are concerned. By the time Such Wicked Intent begins, grief, guilt, temptation, and the lure of forbidden knowledge have only deepened.

The mood is richly gothic without becoming slow. There are secret rooms, ominous books, strange experiments, spiritual danger, and a steady sense that every breakthrough comes with a cost. Oppel keeps the emotional core close to Victor's relationships, which makes the bigger questions land harder. How far should someone go to defeat death? When does love become possession? What happens when intelligence outruns judgment?

This series knows exactly where it is headed, even when the characters do not.

Readers do not come here for a clean heroic arc. They come to watch a bright, damaged boy make choices that feel understandable in the moment and terrible in retrospect. That gives both books a tense, almost inevitable feeling. You can see the shadow of Frankenstein over everything, but the story still works on its own as a pair of dark, fast-moving historical fantasies.

If you want suspense with secret science, emotional messiness, and a strong gothic atmosphere, this series is an easy recommendation. Start with This Dark Endeavor and move straight into Such Wicked Intent. They are very much two halves of the same descent.