VILLAIN (Hench #2) is Author NATALIE ZINA WALSCHOTS long-awaited and worth the wait sequel

VILLAIN (Hench #2)
NATALIE ZINA WALSCHOTS
Watch the inimitable Nancy Pearl interview Author Walschots here!
William Morrow (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It took five years, but the sequel I've quietly pined for has arrived. I downloaded the DRC in February, started reading it in late March, and finished a final pre-review skim last night. I treated this read as a reward, an experience to be savored, because Hench was such a completely fresh experience that it made me rethink the messaging of superhero crap, made me consider how subversion can in fact look like participation or even celebration. I liked The Boys because it's taken that idea to its logical end-point; but it came after Hench had prepared me psychologically for its storytelling mode.

The Department of Superheroic Affairs, aka "the Draft," is the organization that's responsible for everything involving superheroes. They do the recruiting, training, and funding...who ever stops to think about the accounting and expenditures that enable superheroes to blow apart entire city blocks? can you even imagine the insurance bills?!...and they create the most compelling backstories for them that they can. It means only certain tropes survive time-testing as superheroes wreak havoc in order to "save" people from supervillains.

Who also have an organizational structure centered around Leviathan, for whom our dear Anna...formerly Electric Eel's hench, now known as the supervillain "The Auditor" (if that yclepture doesn't provoke horripilation you've never filled out an accounting reimbursement justification)...serves as right-hand person. Leviathan, after the end of Hench sees the biggest rival he has (Supercollider) fall to richly deserved intimate betrayal orchestrated by Anna/The Auditor, is too depressed by the newly unchallenging world he lives in to be effective in supervillainy. Anna/The Auditor needs to snap him out of it but, in a truly tropey twist, The Draft hires a new marketing manager. One who is Anna/The Auditor's equal or possibly superior in data analytics and statistical modeling...the secret superpowers that brought Supercollider down. Now Supercollider is permanently damaged, and dies as the Draft's medics are trying to "untangle him from himself," and the Draft's new marketer finds enough dirt to plausibly, if inaccurately, pin responsibility for his death on Leviathan.

Hijinks ensue.

To look into this only-slightly-distorted mirror world is to see 2026 explained without didactic shouting, blaming, and finger-pointing. It's all here, all the guilty parties are lined up for our scorn and contumely to be unloaded on them, and exactly like real life they are everywhere not just on one side. False dichotomies like hero-v-villain aren't allowed to stand; the acts perpetrated are equally awful, are not discernably different in their results. They're not different in their motivations, either; each "side" is only out to do down the other side and then justify the carnage for everyone else later.

It is here that I come fully into my love of Author Natalie's storytelling. The battling sides are not contesting opposing ideas, arguing through competing society-wide organizational plans, they're solely and entirely focused on hurting each other in increasingly horrifying ways. What that means for non-combatants is (yet again) not part of the calculus except insofar as the optics can be used against the other side.

As Leviathan re-awakens to his supervillainous purpose, Anna/The Auditor and her scoobygroup are stretched on practical and emotional levels to achieve Leviathan's purpose and counteract the Draft's new, high-powered team that uses Anna/The Auditor's innovative techniques against them. As in Hench, the emotional costs of violence, loss, betrayal, and fanaticism are personalized while the impersonal systems grind on propelled by the suffering people behind the major players.

I think Author Natalie took her time...I understand she re-wrote this book four times...to very good effect. I got invested again immediately despite the long interval between reads. I was deftly reminded of things necessary to remember instead of infodumped on; I was also shown how time has passed in the storyverse and the changes that has wrought on significant relationships. It's a fine achievement in storytelling craft. The ending is not A Conclusion. There is openness in its action to either another sequel (yes please!) or simply room for you-the-reader to headcanon something you'd like for the characters. It works for soap operas and comic book series, why not for a supervillain's difficult choices and incomplete emotional development?

I recommend the read; it's not utterly necessary to read Hench first, but why wouldn't you want to? It's a series with a lot to say about the world we live in, and what it says I agree with, so I'm recommending it to all y'all, even the superhero/comic book averse.

After all, that described me before this series came my way.

THE RUNAWAYS: A Novel, flawed, interesting, but beware the animal cruelty

THE RUNAWAYS: A Novel
FATIMA BHUTTO
Verso Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The lives of three radicalized Muslim teenagers—two from Pakistan, one from the United Kingdom—intersect in the Iraqi desert as they travel to a jihadi training camp in Mosul.

Anita lives in Karachi’s biggest slum. Her mother is a maalish wali, paid to massage the tired bones of rich women. But Anita’s life will change forever when she meets her elderly neighbor, a man whose shelves of books promise an escape to a different world.

On the other side of Karachi lives Monty, whose father owns half the city and expects great things of him. But when a beautiful and rebellious girl joins his school, Monty will find his life going in a very different direction.

Sunny’s father left India and went to England to give his son the opportunities he never had. Yet Sunny doesn't fit in anywhere. It’s only when his charismatic cousin comes back into his life that he realizes his life could hold more possibilities than he ever imagined.

These three lives will cross in the desert, a place where life and death walk hand in hand, and where their closely guarded secrets will force them to make a terrible choice.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: What is the process of radicalization? It's ever more timely a question. We in the US are not accustomed to thinking the radicalization process applies to women. In this story, Author Bhutto, whose family has been deeply damaged by radicalized people, treats the process as gender-blind.

I'm glad she did that. In 2026, we need to be aware of how readily educated minds can be co-opted into fields of endeavor I can only think of as anti-social. I'm quite sure Author Bhutto knows each of these people. I'm clear she does not want us to think of them as pieces of a monolithic belief group, but people who found a path to serve a larger purpose and discover a way to live a meaningful life.

Religion being a human thing I dislike and decline to participate in, this story is one I simply read to gain some semblance of understanding for its apparent magnetic appeal to others. I'm no more clear about it now. None of these misguided young people, particularly gay young Sunny, make any tiniest bit of sense to me. I understand none of their motivations any better after the read than before. They're tedious rebellious adolescents. Their path to selfhood and separation from their parents is not one I like or support; I expected that. I wanted to understand at least a little better what inflames the young passions in this cause I don't like or wish success for; not forthcoming. Instead there is an animal cruelty scene I'll never be able to unread.

Not a success for my aims, then; as a novel curiously unsuccessful too. Three PoVs, one deep (Sunny the gay lad...what the hell, Sunny, they'll kill you when they know you're queer!); Monty the vapid rich boy, a gray fog of words and no lightning except an obsession with a girl; Anita...well, what was Anita's PoV? Why was she included when she changed the least of the three?

Monty's mother's religious faith, surprisingly, plays a very small role in this tale pf Muslims becoming radicalized. She is a believer who is not radicalized; why is she not given a role in trying to explain his path's consequences to Monty, instead of abetting him in his course? She is not at all committed to it, that's clear.

I wasn't satisfied on a craft level, then; I didn't get what I'd hoped for; so why am I rating it over three stars? Because Author Bhutto herself is part of a family (follow the link above) terribly impacted by the dreadful roiling cauldron of extremism. I felt her presence in the spaces sh left for me to contemplate the fates of her runaways. It was enough for me to connect emotionally with this flawed novel.

I warn off those squeamish about animal cruelty. Others less sensitive, particularly gay Muslim lads, might get more of a satisfying reading experience.

THOSE SEVEN REFERENCES, an attempt to subvert xian homophobia from within

THOSE SEVEN REFERENCES: A Study of Homosexuality in the Bible and Its Impact on the Queer Community of Faith
JOHN F. DWYER
Morehouse Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: I honestly have no idea how to approach assigning a rating to this book

The Publisher Says: A thoughtful analysis of the faulty rationale behind Christian anti-gay bias.

There have been enormous strides toward equality for the queer community in recent years. There have also been regressive local legislative actions seeking to limit those national steps toward equality. Many of those who have led these regressive efforts are individuals steeped in purposeful ignorance, bias, tribalism, and a radicalization of faithful beliefs, misleading their congregations and influencing legislators.

Personhood, the intense value of our individuality, cannot be made less by these few passages of scripture: God’s love for our uniqueness is not compromised by oft misinterpreted verses. Having knowledge and words to counter baseless accusations can disarm those who would use these passages as weapons of exclusion and judgement, and can empower the queer community to live confidently in God’s love.

My Review: Episcopalian priest Dwyer goes after the uses of seven references to male (and only male) homosexual behaviors present in their entire bloody Bible, which the author contends have been wrongly used as "weapons of violence"; he wrote this work to "{allow} God's voice to be heard in these passages in ways that have been silenced for many generations."

Biblical exegisis would seem an odd choice for a topic of my reading, given my loud and public anti-xianity. I do believe in reading what the enemy writes, though, to be certain I can refute it, condemn it, deny it, or invalidate it somehow. Having read this book, I can honestly say, "Who the hell cares?!?" Nothing in here will dent the armor of foolishness that insists the sprawling, self-contradictory mass of folktales we call "the Bible" is the Inerrant Word of God. Demonstrably untrue, that; no amount of logic, of history, of common sense for Pete's sake, will ever convince the True Believer that the Bible simply cannot be what they claim it is.

So why argue? Why pussyfoot through the "written in a very different time about very different people" stuff? Why point out that the Pentateuch/Torah is an exercise in willful cultural creation, a definition of group identity formed in *direct*opposition*to* the prevailing culture of the place the Israelites were about to invade and conquer (because "God gave it to them"...so God sanctions theft of the property of others, so long as it's not One Of Ours? How edifying). And it pays to note the maleness of all this: only men are prohibited from from same-sex activity because it doesn't lead to procreation. Yet no one notices the corollary to this: Sex with women unable to have children due to age or inability is therefore also prohibited; and women having sex with each other, while unaddressed, must also be prohibited if sex is solely for the purpose of procreation. All those straight Christian consumers of porn featuring girl-on-girl activity take note! (Not like they don't already come in for condemnation under the adultery sections of the law.)

Clearly the subject angers me. It is one of many, many, many points of contempt I have for this Bible. The document, considered as a moral compass, is sick-making (pimping one's daughters out = ok; allowing one's concubine to be *RAPED TO DEATH* = ok; loving sex with someone of one's own gender = abomination...?). As a work of folk history, it's fascinating. As a piece of poetry, it's frequently beautiful (though I confess I think the King James Version is superior to the modern ones here). But a god who takes bets on how much a man can endure in the way of torture, just for kicks? A god who demands a man sacrifice his son, as in KILL HIM, and only as the nutball father is about to do it, countermands the order? Who then says "bye now, I'm off" and vanishes from the sphere of men, and is *still* worshipped as being present?

Really. How in the world can this crap be made to make sense to a person of average intelligence? And yet, somehow, it is. I remain completely bewildered by this.

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

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.