Vicious by V. E. Schwab
365 pages
Published 2013
Read from October 4 to October 8
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Ever since the Marvel Cinematic Universe got me back into superheroes (a subgenre I honestly hadn't given a crap about since I was 11 or so), I've wished that they were an acceptable topic for fantasy novels. It's weird that Warhammer and D&D fanfic fills shelves, that Star Wars tie-in novels top bestseller lists, but superhero books have just never seemed to catch on. Comic books and cartoons had the monopoly for so long, I suppose, that a text-based superhero story rarely occurred to anyone outside of, say, fan-fiction websites. It's possible that this is changing already -- the other day I saw a YA novel starring Marvel's Black Widow, so it's probably only a matter of time before Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters joins Hogwarts on the YA shelves. In the meantime, Vicious is one of the very first "superheroes as urban fantasy" novels I've ever heard of.
Vicious begins promisingly, with an engagingly nonlinear narrative building two parallel mysteries -- the origins of the characters' "ExtraOrdinary" powers and their inexorable course toward animosity, thirst for revenge, and a final showdown. The characters feel drawn straight from a YA magic-school novel, pairing a haughty bad boy with a charming good boy who excels at everything he touches, but the characterizations are vivid enough to partially disguise how archetypal it all is. However, as the twin mysteries are brought to a head, roughly around the halfway mark, setting up the countdown to the long-awaited confrontation, Vicious loses a bit of its momentum and its charm. One of the blurbs on the back cover calls Vicious "A noirish cross between the X-Men and The Count of Monte Cristo," but perhaps a more apt comparison would be a cross between a magic-school novel and a generic "Hunt down the sociopathic killer before he can hunt us down" thriller. The formulaic build-up to the climax, stumbling over itself to get all the pieces into place, feels like a weak end-cap to the promise of the first half.
And I'm left with an unsatisfied itch: Without spoiling anything, a rather blatant Chekhov's gun involving Sydney Clarke's powers is set up and never resolved. Perhaps that was left for the sequel to investigate.
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