HENCH, or let's take "What the HELL Happened Here?!" to the next level

HENCH
NATALIE ZINA WALSCHOTS
Watch the inimitable Nancy Pearl interview Author Walschots here!
William Morrow
$27.99 hardcover, available now

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Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A smart, imaginative, and evocative novel of love, betrayal, revenge, and redemption, told with razor-sharp wit and affection, in which a young woman discovers the greatest superpower—for good or ill—is a properly executed spreadsheet.

Anna does boring things for terrible people because even criminals need office help and she needs a job. Working for a monster lurking beneath the surface of the world isn’t glamorous. But is it really worse than working for an oil conglomerate or an insurance company? In this economy?

As a temp, she’s just a cog in the machine. But when she finally gets a promising assignment, everything goes very wrong, and an encounter with the so-called “hero” leaves her badly injured. And, to her horror, compared to the other bodies strewn about, she’s the lucky one.

So, of course, then she gets laid off.

With no money and no mobility, with only her anger and internet research acumen, she discovers her suffering at the hands of a hero is far from unique. When people start listening to the story that her data tells, she realizes she might not be as powerless as she thinks.

Because the key to everything is data: knowing how to collate it, how to manipulate it, and how to weaponize it. By tallying up the human cost these caped forces of nature wreak upon the world, she discovers that the line between good and evil is mostly marketing. And with social media and viral videos, she can control that appearance.

It’s not too long before she’s employed once more, this time by one of the worst villains on earth. As she becomes an increasingly valuable lieutenant, she might just save the world.

A sharp, witty, modern debut, Hench explores the individual cost of justice through a fascinating mix of Millennial office politics, heroism measured through data science, body horror, and a profound misunderstanding of quantum mechanics.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. SUPPORT YOUR LIBRARY, FOLKS! USE THEM OFTEN!

My Review: Several book ideas later, Author Walschots realized they all fit into one if she used a different frame...

I will make no bones about or apologies for my complete disdain for superhero crap. It's a bad social message. It's worse storytelling. The violence it does to physics and reality is incalculable.

Hey wait! I found *another* level of this book!

That this is a first novel is astonishing. That it is an assured and deft flensing of Western fascism and capitalism is a joy. That I am finding it now, nine months after William Morrow unleashed it on the US, is shocking. This should've flown at me, beating my head with its hard covers, demanding that it enter my consciousness long before now. Alas, the library wait-list was deep. I'm both glad and irked, because that means a lot more people have read it than might otherwise have been able to.

So, two reads in two weeks, and what I take away from it is: Love sucks.

Superhero stories are about loving someone who doesn't, can't, love you back. Part of the joke in Hench is that they cause such horrendous collateral damage because they're unmoored by love, unable to imagine the reality of other people that love demands of us. Superheros, by anyone's definition, are psychopaths. Supervillains, on the other hand, are sociopaths. The definitions aren't hard to grasp, and the conclusions are inescapable. Here we are in the world, the gig economy, that supports the supervillains...the henches, not the Meat, the bastards whose bodies are ripped and torn in the myriad of comic pages, bits flung here and there as X battles Y:

Our own tactical team members, Leviathan’s grade-A Meat (they tended to refer to themselves as Filet Mignon)...

Amusing, no? The Meat willingly serves the purpose, offers their flesh to the mills of the gods. Make jokes about how they're a better grade of Meat.

But think about that. Really, for once, think about that: this is what it costs to be alive but average, or less, in this world. To have unlucky parentage. To be lower than the lowest edge of the 1%:

I was beginning to nurse a feeble hope that maybe, just maybe, that gratitude he was feeling might blossom into a full-time position. Maybe one day I would be able to visit a dentist again.
–and–
Every day, the cost added up. Every day I couldn’t work, or move; every day that passed in a haze of pain and obsessive misery-making added to the total.
–and–
Maybe a lot of those years wouldn’t have been terribly good, and would have involved a lot of busting heads and driving recklessly and working for villains. But they were our shitty years, and they’d been taken from us by an asshole in a cape playing judge and executioner.

This is the thing I've always known but never articulated: The reason I loathe comic books and superhero movies is that I am bitterly opposed to the presumptious and wrongheaded notion that one asshole in a stupid outfit knows better than centuries of legal checks and balances. Yes, indeed, the Law fails; "The law often allows what honor forbids" said Bernard-Joseph Saurin, and his Ancien Régime ass knew what he was talkin' about. But someone needs to explain to me why vigilantism is in any way superior to letting the law do its slow, imperfect, maddeningly unjust work.

Apologizing to corpses is pointless.

But I digress. Hench gave me many moments such as this, the ones that led me down well-worn mental paths of outrage and indignation at the Way Things Are because it's manifestly rigged against ordinary people. The Henches and the Kicks (superheroes's sidekicks) aren't ever going to come out whole and will never entirely accept that they are not part of any future the supers concoct.

Women reading this screed: Yes, I know this is the lived experience of almost all of you.

“You know what’s more criminal than anything I have ever done? That you’ve been overshadowed by that lantern-jawed cock-wit when you’re obviously better than him in every imaginable way.”

Pain crossed her face. “Well. No one is willing to make some bitch the head of the greatest superhero team in the world.”
–and–
Her face was extraordinary. She was Grendel’s mother; she was vengeance incarnate. If she’d had any doubt about what she was doing haunting the edges of her actions, all of that was burned up now.

And there it is. The simplest reduction of male privilege there can be. She's better, smarter, more capable? Get her on the team and make sure she knows she's a girl, a second-class version of a Man. I have always known women were stronger than men; birth proves it. Watch a woman in labor for twelve, fourteen endless, hard-working, rest-less hours. Then tell me she's weak. Watch a woman whose body is hemorrhaging do her job anyway, despite the painful contractions and loss of blood. Roll your eyes, puny man, accuse her of being lesser; but you damn sure couldn't do what she does.

So that said, Hench's women are all about moving around the obstacles that Male Ego presents them; and doing it with purpose, and focus, and dogged determination. (Make a woman hate you at your peril.) The battles are quite revoltingly realistic in their description. There is very significant body horror. There is a lot of screaming, from all concerned, and there is a deeply felt accusation underpinning it all:

Supercollider had a great deal in common with a diamond: aesthetically tacky; value artificially ascribed by corporate greed; cultural significance vastly overinflated; and incredibly hard to damage. I’d theorized that the only thing really capable of hurting him would be himself, the way that diamond was used to cut diamond.

A bit on-the-nose, but valid. The Superheroes are diamonds, tacky brummagem things, capable of being synthesized in labs by the gross but sold to the hoi polloi as the Greatest! Thing!! EVER!!! and they accept it.

We accept it.

It isn't in us to refuse. The System has wound itself tightly about our every single neuron:

Not only were heroes responsible for all of the damage and injury they caused, they were even responsible for creating the villains they fought.

Fighting free involves losing one's sense of purpose, as The Auditor (our PoV character, Anna) discovers:

I wondered if I was jealous. I wished suddenly that I could see my own feelings with as much clarity as I now saw the ultraviolet spectrum.
–and–
"...My husband didn’t give a damn whether the work I was doing was noble as long as it appeared to be. When I killed someone then—something I did a lot more than I do now—it was for the greater good. It was such bullshit. So the second the pretense was gone, so was he. I didn’t need that.”
–and–
“He didn’t try and hide it.” He closed his eyes when he spoke this line, grabbed the podium for support.

“He didn’t care enough.”

This was the clip they played, over and over, the force of his misery making him sway.

The problem this fucked-up system we all acquiesce to is best at producing in bulk is just this, a misery so porfound that it's actually soul-destroying. This sense that we are all being cheated, denied, made fools of by the things we're told to value and given no way to engage with from a place of wholeness.

There was a lovely call-out to Mae West's famous line about diamonds that made me laugh out loud; there was a very sly reference to the MCU in all its acronymic glory; and there was, at the end of the read, a sense in this particularly old reader that there is indeed a reason to hope the future will not happen without witnesses to its glorious excesses.

I'll now take a brief personal moment to screech in revulsion about the two w-bombs dropped by Author Walschots at 9% and 50%. Only cost her half a star, though, because so much else was so delicious.