Vicious (Villains)

Vicious is a revenge/retribution story with a scientific and repeatable version of superheroes, a little bit heist-y. It's clever and fun, built around a strange friendship that goes very wrong when Victor refuses to be a sidekick to Eli's hero.

I love this book, I had a grin on my face for most of the time I was reading it. It's dark, but never really grim, somehow. There's a fair amount of death with just the right amount of gruesome. The backstory/prequel narrative is layered into the present day so that every point feels timely, every detail is a breather from the rising action without losing the plot. There's tenderness in Victor's darkness, a certain schadenfreude in watching Eli squirm as reality gets in the way of his plans. Sydney has just the right balance of actual kid and horror-film creepy child, Mitch supplies a refreshing upheaval and discussion of specific criminal stereotypes, and Serena would have been so easy to play as vapid with no redeeming qualities, but the book takes time to have us understand her too. 

I appreciated how each character has the space to have their own opinion on the ExtraOrdinaries. There's a nuanced discussion of the side-effects for this particular method of gaining powers, with even the EO's themselves disagreeing on what it all means. It makes it feel very grounded and human, at its heart this is a story about a pair of friends whose relationship went very sour very dramatically. I could see how everyone came to their conclusions, even though I don't agree with them all (nor would it really be possible to at one time). 

It's also a superhero story that didn't inundate the plot with heroes and descriptions of powers. There's definitely a place for that, and I hope to get more in the sequel, but that restraint is part of why this feels more like soft sci-fi with a superhero twist, rather than a more straightforward "people with random powers" narrative. The approach to EO's was scientific, specifically so. At least, it was experimental with a very loose application of the scientific method that wouldn't fly in a real study. Part of that impatience, moving past the guidelines they'd set almost as soon as they'd set them, made it really feel like what a bunch of young college-age friends with a little bit of a good idea and no sense of their own vulnerability would attempt. It didn't break the suspension of disbelief because the world was internally consistent, though I'm sure anyone who does scientific experiments for a living would have much harsher words for them.

I love heist stories, which is at least part of why I loved this book. While this wasn't precisely a heist narrative, it has a lot of that energy, that group of tropes that combine to say that sneaky and cool things are happening here.

 I want more, I will definitely check out the sequel. 
**I’m no longer planning to check out the sequel.

V.E. Schwab’s Vicious had a lot to recommend it: an eye-catching cover, rave reviews from authors I trust, and a premise that promises to toy with superhero and villain tropes in interesting ways. The problem is that I never really bought the way the main characters get their powers, and that ended up souring me on the book. It also didn’t help that Vicious seemed to have ambitions of subverting the genre but fell prey to some of its hoariest cliches.

Victor Vale and Eli Cardale are college roommates and unlikely best friends. Victor is an anti-social misfit and Eli has every appearance of all-American normality, but as they get to know each other, it quickly becomes clear that they share not only an ambitious drive to succeed but also a darkness boiling just under the surface. Their relationship comes to a crucial turning point when Eli starts working on a term paper examining the source of “extra ordinaries” or “EOs” – near-mythical human beings with super-powers – and Victor suggests they try to put Eli’s findings into practice.

When Eli brings up the topic of EOs, that is the first real hint we’re given that we are dealing with a world that isn’t quite our own. Eli mentions EOs and everyone in his class knows what he means, but the world of Vicious doesn’t seem to have the concept of traditional comic book superheroes and villains. EOs may exist, but they certainly don’t run around wearing capes or acting under flamboyant pseudonyms.

Honestly, I think this reveal is where I started having problems with Vicious. The world-building felt a little shaky at this point and things only get worse from there. After Eli announces his intention to write about EOs, it isn’t long before he theorizes that near-death experiences may be connected to EO powers and Victor convinces him to test that out. Before you know it, they’ve performed a few incredibly irresponsible experiments and become super-powered under conditions that just feel trivial.

Eli and Victor’s experiments aren’t at all scientific or rigorous, and Schwab never provides an explanation for their powers that I found satisfactory. The only thing that made sense to me was that they must live in an alternate universe where anyone who almost dies comes back super-powered. That would create a lot of EOs, but doesn’t jibe with the way everyone in Vicious treats EOs as nothing more than a fanciful rumor until Victor and Eli start digging into the subject. Schwab tells us how EOs happen but never explains why, and that bothered me the whole time I was reading.

It’s a shame, really, that I got so hung up on the basic building blocks of this story, because Vicious was reasonably entertaining at points. The characterization was decent, the moral grey areas were impressively large, and the details of the world were tantalizing enough that I wanted to know more than Schwab delivered.

Vicious is a book with a few cool ideas that ultimately don’t pay off, but I do think it speaks to the potential of its author. I’ll be curious to see what else Schwab writes, and it’s possible I’ll give another one of her books a shot some day. Unfortunately, this one just wasn’t my cup of tea.