Vicious

Vicious

By V.E. Schwab

Victor and Eli started out as college roommates―brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong.

Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison, determined to catch up to his old friend (now foe), aided by a young girl whose reserved nature obscures a stunning ability. Meanwhile, Eli is on a mission to eradicate every other super-powered person that he can find―aside from his sidekick, an enigmatic woman with an unbreakable will. Armed with terrible power on both sides, driven by the memory of betrayal and loss, the archnemeses have set a course for revenge―but who will be left alive at the end?

About a third of the way into the book, I told my fiance that I wasn't sure how much I liked it, as it was "unpleasant".  That's the problem with anti-hero books sometimes - there's nobody in the book that you want to spend time with, or see succeed, so any storyline is going to fall a little flat in the face of your "don't-even-care" -ism.  What happened in Vicious, to make me enjoy it, is that in then later parts of the book, Victor becomes less monstrous and more sympathetic (possibly because we just spend less time inside his head in the second half) and you start rooting for his side to win, if only because Sydney and Mitch are basically innocents in all this (the least bloody hands of the characters, shall we say) and because everyone can agree that a killer who is a religious hypocrite is, like, just the worst.

I don't know that the structure of the book - flipping back and forth from the present to various points in time of the different characters' stories - was necessary, or added anything to the book.  I think the struggle is that you want to create some tension between the "pre-EO" transformation, and the current revenge rampage events, but the problem is that, while necessary to show the relationship between Victor and Eli, the "pre-EO" events are not all that exciting.  It's a lot of Victor being weirdly obsessed with Eli, and, as I mentioned before, it's a fairly unpleasant viewpoint to inhabit.

It's only as we focus more on the final showdown between Eli and Victor that things ramp up, and the book becomes more engrossing.  I will say that although I did enjoy the ultimate resolution and how things worked out, I found it kind of silly that, on the eve of their great battle, both Victor and Eli decide to fill the hours by...tracking down a completely new EO with an unknown skill and looking to recruit or kill him, respectively.  Like, how you do decide that shortly before you face your nemesis is a good time to go hunt and kill some other rando?  Like, "Oh, I've got a few hours to kill.  Let me decompress and prepare by going to a bar and killing someone else." Or conversely, "I have a few hours to kill.  Let me track this rando down and hope that he'll miraculously (a) be useful to me and (b) want something desperately that only I can provide, so as to convince him to join me."

The whole thing felt very deus ex machina, and kind of unnecessary, like, why introduce this new guy at the eleventh hour? But ignoring that (and the original deus ex that involved the two sisters somehow hooking up on opposite sides with Victor and Eli to begin with) it's still fun to watch all the pieces come together - and the small hoodwinking of you as you discover in the final pages what Victor's plan really was, all along.

I was originally thinking I would read the sequel but the reviews have dissuaded me - this stands perfectly well on its own, and no sense in gilding the lily. 


18: A Book About Someone With A Superpower