The Boys meets Starter Villain and Assistant to the Villain in Natalie Zina Walschots’s electrifying, sharp, violent, and hilarious sequel to the highly acclaimed novel, Hench, in which the Auditor must confront the near-impossible in order to right the many wrongs in the superhuman industry…or cause more of them. She’s not picky.
Anna, better known to superheroes as the Auditor, has carved out a name for herself. Any hero unlucky enough to cross her path knows her potential and powers. Surely, success should taste she has an incredible job with lots of perks, and her boss will literally annihilate anyone who crosses her, and her greatest enemy, the former hero Supercollider, has been utterly defeated and literally ground to a pulp.
But Anna still has her sights set on a greater destroying the Draft, the organization that makes, trains, and manages the world’s most powerful superheroes. These “heroes” have shown time and time again that they do more harm than good, and now is the time to stop the damage at its source.
Yet all is not well for the Auditor and her fellow evildoers. Her employer, Leviathan—the world’s most feared supervillain—is not coping well with Supercollider’s defeat at someone else’s hands. Moreover, her unlikely ally and unexpected friend, Quantum Entanglement, has vanished without a trace, leaving Anna to examine all the ways they deceived each other. Tension and uncertainty fill the air, and fear that this moment of triumph is about to crumble looms over all of them.
Anna soon finds herself facing down an opponent unlike any she’s taken on before—not another superhero, but someone like her…someone much more the Draft’s Chief Marketing Officer. This isn’t a test of physical prowess, but ideas, and as the fight spirals deeper and deeper, with new foes popping up every day—she’ll need more than just her superpower—data research—to keep ascending through the supervillain ranks.
It’s guerrilla ad warfare, and the Auditor might have finally met her match.

My Review:

The story in Villain picks up immediately where Hench left off. I mean immediately, meaning that Villain is not a standalone and you need to start with Hench. And it’s SO worth it.

But the location is, surprisingly from the Auditor’s perspective, in a complete and absolute slough of despond at Leviathan HQ. Leviathan’s arch-nemesis Supercollider has been reduced to a puddle of goo – literally – but Leviathan isn’t the one responsible for reducing his greatest enemy to a living sludge-pile. That honor goes to Quantum Entanglement. Leviathan is standing on that fine line between hate and love – because Supercollider was his lifelong nemesis, they even trained together before Leviathan turned to the darkside – and he’s grieving and can’t either admit it or deal with it.

The Auditor doesn’t actually care who disposed of the bastard, just that he’s out of the superhero business. What Quantum Entanglement’s name implies is what she actually did. Supercollider may be technically alive – but he can’t be fixed. No one is certain he can even be killed because of the nature of his superpowers.

But they are absolutely certain he is out of the game – even if Superhero HQ, AKA the Draft – is lying through their collective teeth rather than let that particular cat out of the super-secret bag.

The Auditor wants to kick the Draft while they’re down. But Leviathan is emotionally AWOL. His staff and followers believe that he died in the showdown that took Supercollider out. The Auditor is one of the few that know the truth – and it’s just about killing her to keep the secret from her own people.

Her weaponization of spreadsheets has turned into a position of crisis management – and she pretty much hates it. Nearly as much as she loves her not-exactly-human boss who isn’t exactly talking to her at the moment.

The reader feels her frustration at the delay of action in both her professional AND personal lives. Not that they aren’t pretty much one and the same by this point in her career as Leviathan’s right hand hench.

Once the Draft’s lies about Supercollider start exploding in their faces, they kick the can right down the road to Leviathan’s court. They blame him for the death of their hero, a death the Draft itself caused as either a last-ditch medical attempt to unentangle the blob – or a mercy killing.

The Draft brings Leviathan back from the metaphorically dead – and it works. It works for their PR machine, but it also works for Leviathan’s psyche. He’s back, he’s in charge, and he’s eager to let the Auditor, HIS Auditor, take up the reins of being evil to her heart’s content, yet again.

Even as the Draft makes a “Hail, Mary” pass at converting the Auditor back to their side – along with any other hench they can manage to convince that good is better. Even if, or especially because, true hench know that the Superhero side isn’t better – it’s actually worse.

Made even more so by being such sanctimonious, hypocritical, twats about the vast amount of damage that they do – especially to their own.

Escape Rating A+: Villain is an utterly compelling story about crisis management and the truly villainous power of SPREADSHEETS!

It’s also, and more notably, the follow-up to the extremely awesome Hench, which was – and still is – “decadently delicious villainous competence porn” as I said in my review of Hench back in September 2020, OMG during the pandemic, and have been hoping for a sequel for FIVE AND A HALF YEARS. I kind of gave up hope.

Which doesn’t mean that I wasn’t thrilled to see this appear, and that I didn’t gobble the whole book down in a day. (Howsomever, if the final copy of this book is REALLY the estimated 368 pages of the estimate the type is going to be miniscule. My kindle eARC had over 7000 kindle locs – which means it was approximately twice that long. I STILL finished it in a day – admittedly a long one.) (I wrote this review several months ago. The page count has been revised UPWARDS by 100 pages. Which feels a whole lot more realistic. OTOH The Draft obfuscates and hyperbolizes JUST LIKE THIS.)

However, I’m over here still trying to tone my SQUEE down and it’s not working. #sorrynotsorry

Stories about the toxicity of the superhero concept have been done – I’m thinking particularly of the TV series The Boys. Stories based on what the real world costs of superheroes among us have also been done. Hench was one of those stories, along with the Assistant to the Villain series. (Hench predates Assistant by several years. BTW.) It’s kind of an obvious idea to play with if you think about the damage to NYC in Marvel’s Avengers and wonder who the hell paid to fix it? (If you wonder a LOT there’s plenty of fanfiction that plays with THAT concept)

In Hench, Anna, now “The Auditor” embodied that damage. Literally. Supercollider broke her body, mostly by accident, and both he and the Draft ignored her – and other victims just like her. Then Supercollider targeted her – for fun.

No wonder she turned completely to the ‘dark side’. At least supervillains own the things they do.

This second book digs deeper, in multiple directions. The Auditor’s superpowered data analysis uncovers more dirt about the Draft and the damage it deliberately does to the budding superheroes it, well, drafts. She exposes their dark underbelly – and it’s very dark indeed under there.

At the same time, she’s at a crossroads in her own life – one that the Draft is more than willing to exploit after all the data analysis they’ve done on her. She became a hench, because she wanted to fight against the superheroes using the only talent available to her, data analysis. But her nemesis is out of the game. Her revenge fueled work is done. If she continues from this point, then it’s because she wants to be evil.

(This reader found herself wondering about the nature of evil in this story, because it feels like the same “evil is a matter of perspective” scenario as the Queens of Villainy fantasy series. Leviathan – and by extension his Auditor – is called evil because he regularly thwarts the plans of the supposedly good superheroes of the Draft. But the side of good is objectively not truly good. If the superheroes are not good, does that mean that the supervillains are not evil? I’m still mulling this one over. A lot.)

The one thing she’s certain she does want is Leviathan himself. There’s a romance there that I’m not sure is a good thing for the Auditor and not just because it reminds me a LOT of the very unequal power balance of the romance in But Not Too Bold – which was a borderline horror story. The physical power imbalance between Leviathan and the Auditor is inescapable, but the way that he exploits the many other facets of the power he has over her – he’s her lover and her boss, and because the perks of her job include her on-site luxury apartment he’s her landlord as well. If she gets fired, if she displeases him, she’s jobless, homeless and likely dead. But the icing on this particular squicky cake is that he has performed body modifications to her that give him the ability to see out of her eyes and hear from her ears 24/7 without her consent. She can’t even tell when he’s watching.

They do manage to negotiate a less inequitable relationship, but there was a lot of squicky non-consensual stuff going on for a while and I’m not sure whether the story as a whole was helped or hindered by it. It’s my mixed feelings on this particular score that made this an A+ review instead of an A++ review as Hench was.

Because as much as I worried over Anna’s situation, and as icky as she – and I – felt about Leviathan’s potential for constant surveillance and his overwhelming possessiveness and desire for control, I was still powerfully sucked into this story and could not tear myself away. Not that I tried terribly hard.

I think there is plenty more story in store for the Auditor. Now that she’s fully invested in being a Villain, and the superheroes and their Draft are on the ropes yet again, it’s time for her to climb the ranks of supervillain alongside Leviathan. Unless she decides to forge her own path – or it gets forged FOR her. Either way, I hope we see her again – at the top of her game – in a future book in this series. Because this one was definitely worth the wait!