Villain – Psychologically Delightful

Hench is the book that relaunched my interest in Superhero media. It wasn’t the first to deconstruct whether or not the heroes are the good folks, not by any stretch of the imagination. However, it brought a modern take to the genre and reveled in delicious ambiguity. Villain was one of the releases I was most excited about this year. I think Hench is the stronger novel overall, but the highs in Villain are much more delicious and psychological.

This review will include plenty of spoilers for Hench, so I’d avoid continuing unless you’ve read it. See my review for that book here.

What Worked for Me:
The big draw of Hench – for me at least – is Walschots commitment to being uncommitted about Anna’s morality. Is she justified? Are heroes as bad as she says? Are villains justified in their actions? You can read Anna as a selfish hypocrite or a ruthless reformer cutting out the cancer of society. The narrative doesn’t give you firm clues in either direction, and so few genre fiction books allow for that! Villain continues to encourage the reader to ask questions and not take Anna’s thoughts at face value, though there’s less ambiguity in this volume. An early moment occurs where Anna learns about a subordinate’s traumatic experience with a former employer: the villain set a hench on fire as a response for the hench’s mistakes. Anna is disgusted by this. However, she herself works for a man (insect) who kidnapped a child and stuck the kid in a freezer because her dad fucked up caring for Leviathan’s favorite pet lizard. She’s aware that Leviathan would kill his employees if they take certain actions, especially relating to Supercollider’s disappearance or Anna herself. Yet she holds other villains and heroes to a different standard than she’s willing to hold herself or Leviathan. It’s a moment that Walschots doesn’t draw attention to, but is a nice little reminder that she may not be totally reliable as a narrator. Its a delicious bit of hypocrisy that pervades the series.

I do think Villain places its hands on the proverbial scales, however. It isn’t nearly as subtle about Anna’s actions as the book goes on, and there’s less and less of Hench’s ambiguity and plausible deniability the further you read. There’s a moment where Anna has set up a riot to kill some ex-teammates of a Hero she’s hoping to psychologically break. When some of the rioters are killed by two surviving heroes, she makes clear that the deaths go on the ‘damage toll’ that those supers have caused. Now, it was clear that this group took pleasure in causing pain to civilians and were more or less strike breakers. The narrative isn’t defending them. However, when the crowd in question came with the intention to tear them apart bit by bit – they literally dismembered one of the supers during the riot – Anna’s placement of blame on the supers in this case is a clear indication that she has become a villain proper. No longer is she serving the just cause she thinks she does, and she places more blame at the Draft’s feet than it perhaps totally deserves. It’s more complicated than evil for the sake of evil, of course. Supers and The Draft are also horrid, but there are fewer and fewer arguments to made that Anna is a good person. This is very much an ‘everybody’s shitty’ type of story, and I love that.

Actually, thematically this book succeeded most as a book showing how Anna has passed the point of no return. The titles of Hench and Villain are a nice thumbprint of how she views herself in each book. The idea that comes up multiple times, ranging from how she doesn’t minimize her threat level in conversation to her discomfort when she sees the name Anna instead of Auditor. Her work has shifted from something she does to something she is, and that piece of character-work was handled very well. Walschots presents Anna with more and more plausible exit strategies to turn her life around, but she is committed to her path in life.

Final little tidbit – this book has just the smallest amount of psychological horror, in part related to her delightfully fucked up relationship with Leviathan. It was excellently rendered, and the best parts of this book were all about Anna’s brain. Well, plus Leviathan, who had delightful characterization as a man whose sense of love is twisted beyond anything we can recognize, paired with Anna’s reactions to his boundary crossing.

What Didn’t Work For Me:
I thought the opening of this book had a lot of pacing issues. Leviathan is pretending to be dead, grieving his nemesis’s defeat, and refusing to let Anna take action against the Draft. Considering this was the stated goal of the whole book, it felt like were were just spinning our wheels. I think this was an attempt to reset the pacing of this book to line up with book 1, and to allow for a more traditional ‘start slow, then escalate’ plot structure. This book didn’t need that reset however, especially because it didn’t feel terribly believable to me. Instead of helping build up to something interesting, the first 20% of the story was just Anna as middle-management with a micromanger boss. It’s not even a particularly interesting version of that idea. Lots of Anna’s underlings want to do things, and Anna says no despite also wanting to take action. Just felt like walking on a treadmill, which was not what I hoped for from this story.  I didn’t find the tension between Anna and Leviathan terribly interesting in these opening sections either (it gets better, so much better), and I spent the first few hours of the audiobook questioning whether or not I wanted to DNF. I’m glad I hung with it, but I think the first 75 pages could have been condensed into a 5 page montage. The book would have been much better for it.

I also found that Villain got a bit indulgent. The word masturbatory comes to mind, actually. This is something I’ve noticed with sequels to books that easily could have been standalones, though the example that comes to mind is Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (one of the best YA coming of age novels I’ve read). I think Walschots became a bit too much of a fan of Anna as a character, which led her to remove a lot of interesting external tension. A major plotline in the book is The Draft having built up something of a counterpart to Anna. His name is Black Pill, and he, like Anna, fights with inconvenience and indirect psychological warfare. He’s moderately effective, but Walschots really leans into him going on unhinged rants about how he is Anna’s Nemesis and that his work is so impressive while Anna smirks internally about how little Black Pill matters. Really the narrative makes him feel like a squirming worm undeserving of any recognition. On its own, this would be fine. However, it felt like a rehash of how Walschots handled Supercollider, and the situations were similar enough that it gave me pause. Then I realized that more minor antagonists (such as a manosphere podcast, or an overly bubbly admin for the Draft) all have similar writing around their dialogue that paint them as … well perhaps unserious is the best word? They cause harm, but they never really feel like a threat in any meaningful way. Would it have killed Walschots to give Anna a real antagonist? I love competence porn as much as the next guy, but Villain leans into the worst version of it. Honestly, it jaded me a little bit on Hench, because now what I saw as a single fun and interesting choice in Supercollider was maybe actually a crutch?

Conclusion: Internal conflicts and development are supremely engaging, but I was disappointed in the Anna vs Draft storyline