Hench: A Novel

I loved this book. I read it as part of the Canada reads finalist group of books, and it was in my top 2 of the 5. It took a couple of chapters to adapt to the superhero genre, but after that, it was one of those books you can't wait to return to. I hope there is a sequel.

Riveting suspense and glorious characters spin a story that defies classification. Right up there with best of so called sci-fi. Could not put it down.

This is just the novel for 2020 in its complete and utter nihilism. In the fantasy world of the plot, rage and a savage desire for revenge are seen as the only legitimate responses to a corrupt system. We are supposed to identify with the first-person narrator and her ability to destroy people's lives through the use of data bases and a huge corporate structure run by a super-villain, because reasons, and they deserve it. She has done the math and determined that super-heroes cause endless amounts of damage and suffering, but somehow doesn't think to do the same calculation for her (literally and unabashedly) evil employer. All pretenses to virtue are mere posturing and bad faith - there's no such thing as real heroes, because being an actual hero is too hard to be achievable, so we might as well all be "honest" about our villainy. Anything else is mere self-delusion, so why not just cut loose our inner psychopath? Frankly, the television series *The Boys* explores this trope much more successfully, and if you want to read a book which might actually help you through these difficult times I recommend *The Plague* by Camus, which recognizes all of our existential limitations without descending into this puerile foolishness . There's a reason he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, which is not something Walschots needs to worry about.

First, this is just a wonderfully compelling read -- outside of work, I have the attention span of a meth-addicted fruit fly, and I couldn't put this down once I started. It's just flat-out fun, provided your sense of humor runs a bit dark. It starts with the familiar "what if superheroes really existed?" trope, but takes an interesting spin on it -- how easy it is to hide the real costs of something that is sold as a public good. The novel winds up a weirdly compelling blend of competence porn, career novel (some of Anna's management techniques seem like good ideas), superheroes, tenderness, found (and lost) families, and social critique. Think a more millennial (and morally ambiguous) version of "Leverage" meets "Velveteen vs." Aaargh, I feel like anything I say in this review is going to make it sound awful and preachy, but it's funny, touching, and very, very angry in all the right ways, while also being incredibly entertaining. (Trigger warning for body horror, though.)

What if it was up to the villains to save the world from the heroes? Call it a satirical impulse if you like, but what the author of this amazing debut novel is arguing is that we live in a world so far beyond satire that even our fantasies have become meaner and more desperate. Anna, our narrator and millenial Everywoman, is living hand to mouth as a temp worker; her latest assignment, as an assistant to a second-rate supervillain, ends when the World's Greatest Hero steps in, leaving several people dead and Anna disabled, unemployed, and effectively homeless. With nothing to do except the math, she logs on, crunches the numbers for days, and asks: Aren't superheroes more like natural disasters than persons? Don't their actions literally create more problems than they solve? The novel charts Anna's evolution from crackpot conspiracy theorist to arch-nemesis, and the quiet miracle of HENCH is that it manages to make the choice of embracing the dark side seem perfectly reasonable (organized evil sure does have good medical benefits). Note, too, how Anna's supervillain name, first hurled at her as a sexist insult, then taken up as an office joke, eventually becomes a name even her enemies respect. You gotta love that. There's a lot to enjoy here, not least the novel's diversity -- the cast is full of nonwhite, queer, and nonbinary characters -- but also the way the story is built on a philosophical foundation of the problem of evil. That's a problem (liberated from its theological context) of value judgments, free will, and right and wrong actions. Objectively: how many lives (innocent or not) and livelihoods do superheroes cost? Subjectively: what if the line between good and evil is a matter of marketing? The geeky comic book fans of forty and fifty years ago now run the entertainment industry, and I'm surprised only at how few prose novels about the superhero milieu ever get noticed outside of an SF niche. The last one to get mainstream exposure that I remember, Austin Grossman's SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE (2007), stil follows what you might call "the unwritten rules," in which superbeings can bust up a city block in a fight without inflicting a single civilian casualty, and there's certainly no one tallying up that story's property damage and job losses. Grossman's novel was probably supposed to be seen as a satire, but as I said, we live in a world beyond satire. Graphic novels like WATCHMEN, THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, and WANTED (I don't mean the insipid movies that went by those titles) demonstrate that when you do add up the civilian casualties, your superhero satire turns into a horror story. Maybe the lesson of HENCH is that nothing beats the power of rage, except rage coupled with brains. Or is it that nothing damns us more deeply than the longing for a better world? It's a grim little fanta...