Victor LaValle's Destroyer Books in Order

Victor LaValle's Destroyer is not a simple retelling of Frankenstein. It is a modern continuation that takes Mary Shelley's old nightmare and drops it into present-day America. The story begins with Dr. Josephine Baker, a brilliant scientist and the last descendant of the Frankenstein family, after her son Akai is killed by police. Grief pushes her toward the same forbidden question that haunted her ancestor. If science can create life, can it also undo a loss that should be impossible to survive?

That setup gives the series two monsters right away. There is the original Monster, still moving through the world with all the pain and memory that history handed him. And there is Akai, brought back through means that were never going to stay gentle or clean. The comic never treats resurrection like a miracle without consequences. Every page asks what comes back with the body, and what never can.

Love is the engine here, but it burns hot enough to become vengeance.

LaValle uses the Frankenstein myth to talk about state violence, borders, surveillance, and the way power decides whose pain matters. The book moves through labs, remote hideouts, and public spaces that feel one bad decision away from catastrophe. It keeps asking who gets called monstrous, who gets protected, and who is written off as collateral damage. That is where the series gets its bite. It is political without forgetting that the politics land hardest through individual lives.

Josephine is not written as a stock mad scientist. She is a mother, a researcher, and a person making terrible choices for reasons the book wants you to understand even when you cannot defend them. The original Monster is just as complicated. He has spent his life being used, feared, and misunderstood, so his rage carries real weight. When he and Josephine collide, the comic becomes a fight over legacy as much as survival.

Akai gives the series its deepest sadness. He is not just a symbol of Josephine's grief or a new version of the Monster. He is a child caught between what he was, what his mother wants back, and what the world will let him become. That tension keeps the comic from turning into a straightforward revenge story.

Nobody gets off clean.

The tone is bleak, tense, and fast-moving, more horror comic than superhero book. Across six issues, the plot widens from one family's catastrophe into something much larger, but it never loses sight of the people inside the disaster. If you like Frankenstein stories that care as much about power and injustice as they do about sparks and corpses, Destroyer gives you plenty to dig into.