Vicious

Vicious is what happens when the hero and villain both insist they got the better part.

I have a weakness for a book that looks at a man announcing his moral purpose and quietly moves the sharp objects out of reach. Vicious had me within twenty pages. It did not ask me to love Victor Vale. It asked me to keep watching him, which is a much more dangerous proposition.

V.E. Schwab published this first Villains novel in 2013, and it still feels unusually confident about withholding comfort. I enjoyed its cold nerve more than I enjoyed any individual person in it. That is a compliment, with a small warning attached: if you need someone to tuck into bed and defend at dinner, pick another book.

The premise (no spoilers past Victor's return from prison)

Victor Vale and Eli Cardale are college roommates whose shared interest in near-death experiences grows into the possibility of extraordinary abilities. Their research becomes an experiment. It goes badly. Ten years later, Victor is out of prison and hunting the former friend who has become his enemy. Eli, meanwhile, has made it his mission to eliminate other people with powers. Victor travels with a young girl whose quiet manner hides an ability of her own.

That is plenty to know before going in. The book supplies the moral arguments in pieces, and half the pleasure lies in noticing when you have accepted one without inspecting it. The setting is a recognisable modern world with abilities grafted onto it, which makes the ordinary human decisions feel less excusable, not more.

What works

Schwab cuts between the friendship's collapse and its ugly aftermath. The jumps are short enough to keep the chase moving, but placed so that each answer changes the question you were asking. I like that sort of structural mischief. A straight chronological version might have produced a tidy cautionary tale about ambition. This arrangement gives us a grudge before it gives us its history, and lets both men audition for the job of wounded party.

The prose knows when to stand back. Schwab can give an image a hard edge, then leave a confrontation to the clipped rhythm of two people who already know how to hurt each other. I rarely felt she was explaining the ethics on my behalf. Her best move is making Victor and Eli similar enough that their difference in self-description becomes comic, then frightening. One calls his conduct necessary. The other could make the same argument. I found myself wanting a referee and then realising the referee would probably be dreadful too.

Victor is a particularly good centre of gravity because his attention is selective. He can be strategic, attentive and startlingly blank in close succession. The book never hands me a permission slip to call that tenderness. Yet the small, improvised circle around him matters, and I kept checking where its loyalties lay. A superpower story that makes me worry more about the people standing near the powerful than about the spectacle itself has understood the assignment.

There is also a pleasing economy to the underlying idea. Abilities arise from a process with an awful human cost, so every claim of exceptionalism comes preloaded with a question about what someone was willing to do. No elaborate chart of powers is required. The characters have already done the frightening arithmetic.

What's polarising

The book's polish can make its emotional temperature feel controlled to the point of chill. Several people are fascinating at arm's length, and I wanted one more moment when the machinery of revenge stopped clicking and somebody had to live, plainly, with what they had done. If you read for interior softness, that distance may feel like a locked room with very handsome furniture.

The structure also makes a wager on your patience. Its time shifts sharpen the rivalry, but they sometimes announce that a revelation is coming just when I would rather stay in the present and let the pressure build. I admired the placement more consistently than I felt surprised by it. Cleverness is seductive; a few turns are just a shade too pleased with being clever.

And do not mistake the villain label for a promise of romantic danger. This is a feud with an almost intimate intensity, but its central bond is not a romance. A reader arriving for a morally grey love interest and a kiss after an argument will find two men more interested in winning the argument forever. Honestly, that is their problem.

The Victor of it

Victor Vale is the rare lead whose capacity for care makes him less easy to trust. He notices what others need, and he also notices how useful that knowledge can be. I was most caught by the tension between those impulses. Schwab does not ask me to diagnose him or polish him into a secret sweetheart. She lets him be frighteningly competent and intermittently decent, then makes me decide whether the second quality changes the first.

Eli is a fine counterweight because his certainty is louder than Victor's. Their old closeness gives every later clash a private vocabulary, even when the stakes grow public. I could see how two ambitious people might mistake being understood for being safe. That is the book's nastiest little observation, and I mean that affectionately.

Spice and heat

Heat: 0 of 5 for on-page intimacy. The charged relationship here is rivalry, not a developing love story; anyone shelving this for explicit romance is being sold the wrong kind of trouble. Some catalogues rate the book higher for suggestive material, but reader accounts also describe little sexual content and no explicit sex. My practical reading note is simpler: come for obsession, not spice.

The content is dark in other ways. Expect death, violence, grief and the peril built into experiments with near-death experiences. The book treats power as a thing people acquire through harm, and it does not make the resulting damage pretty. If that is what you are avoiding, the low heat rating will not make this a gentle read.

Who it's for

Read Vicious if you like a swift, slightly cruel puzzle and can enjoy a protagonist without drafting his defence. Read it if your favourite part of a hero story is the moment someone asks who wrote the hero's biography. You will have more fun if you enjoy clean narrative reversals than if you require a romance to anchor the darkness.

I would hand it to the friend who says they want morally complicated characters, then watch whether they mean complicated or merely rude in a flattering coat. This book can tell the difference. It may tell your friend too.

Books like Vicious

• Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots, for a sharp look at the people injured by heroic spectacle and the anger that follows.
• The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins, for another unnerving contest over power with a taste for black humour.
• The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, for a long rivalry that turns a speculative gift into an ethical problem.

None is a substitute for Victor and Eli's particular brand of mutual destruction. That is rather the point. Once you finish Vicious, the useful next question is not how to find another pair exactly like them. It is how many different kinds of damage a brilliant person can call destiny.

Finished the book and not ready to leave? Victor Vale is waiting on Fictora.

Talk to Victor Vale