Such Wicked Intent

The second of Oppel’s novels inspired by the story of Frankenstein, this story follows on from This Dark Endeavour. Set in a chateau in early 19th-century Switzerland and subtitled ‘The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein’, Such Wicked Intent takes up the story immediately after the earlier volume, in which 16-year-old Victor dabbled in the occult, trying to save his twin Konrad from death.

Victor discovers a means of travelling through a time portal in their chateau into a timelessness in which Konrad exists, awaiting ‘collection’ to either heaven or hell. But unwittingly, in trying to raise Konrad from the dead, Victor and his friends Henry and Elizabeth unleash an evil being which threatens to destroy them all.

More overtly horror-based than its predecessor, this dark and gripping novel also evokes the poetry of Wordsworth and Tennyson and Romantic images in the art of Fuseli and Friedrich.