Hench
Natalie Zina Walschots
William Morrow
Fiction, Sci-Fi
Themes: Diversity, Girl Power, Heroes and Supervillains, Stardom
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Description
Behind every superhero is a support team, and villains are no different. From hired muscle (or "meat") to research and development to data entry, every villain needs henchpeople to keep the wheels of their various schemes rolling. Anna had been temping as a hench for years, generally for low-level baddies, when she wound up working for Electric Eel - which is how she found herself on the wrong side of a casual backhand from invulnerable hero Supercollider. The blow shattered her leg, leaving her in permanent pain, and cost her her job. The incident left her numbers-focused mind obsessed with how many other people, from low-level henches like herself to completely innocent bystanders, have had their lives ruined by the so-called good guys, for all that their PR teams hush up talk of collateral damage. The results astound her: the average hero's collateral damage is on par with a natural disaster, and none are nearly as destructive as the lauded hero Supercollider himself. As Anna's research gains notoriety through her blog, she comes to the attention of Leviathan, the legendary supervillain. With his backing and blessing, she develops a scheme of her own: using spreadsheets and data processing and statistics to meddle with the heroes' daily lives and reputations, she will get her revenge on the one-man hurricane of destruction named Supercollider. But villainy, even justified villainy, never comes without cost, and Anna is about to learn the hard way just how much she still has to lose.
Review
Hench isn't the first story to explore and subvert popular tropes of heroes and villains and how blurry the line between the two
can become, with monsters hiding behind capes and public adoration. It also isn't the first to explore the life of an office lackey. Walschots
brings darkly subversive humor to bear on the subject, with office politics and struggling temp workers who don't really care that their bosses
are technically evil so long as the pay and benefits are good. When Anna's life is ruined by a heroic encounter, she starts examining her
employers' enemies as something other than a nuisance to her struggling career, determining the ultimate cost of heroism to be far greater than
the damage done by the villains they purport to oppose - especially when one takes into account how many villains are created as direct results
of poor interactions with heroes. Anna claims to have given up any youthful ambitions toward supervillainy herself, but it's clear that her
encounter with Supercollider has provided the necessary spark, even as Leviathan feeds that spark with near-unlimited resources as he pursues
his own vendetta against the hero. The more one sees behind the masks, the more one comes to see Anna's point, even if the means by which she
pursues her goals are generously described as gray.
The reason this book dropped in the ratings has a little to do with a sense of meandering that settles in once the premise becomes clear, but
more to do with the final third or so of the book, when the big encounter goes awry and Anna is left to pick up the pieces and pursue justice
(or revenge) on her own. The climax itself has an unsettling, drawn out and grotesque element to it that I found increasingly repulsive the
longer it drug on, grinding my virtual face in its depravity. The finale also failed to provide the emotional catharsis the story had been
building toward; it felt more like it was almost (but not quite) setting up a sequel than anything else, ending on a vaguely unsatisfying tone
where one wonders whether anyone learned or gained anything from the whole affair... which I suppose may well have been the overall point, the
futility of fighting evil with evil and the unsatisfactory feeling when one realises one's many sacrifices haven't bought you at all what you
were hoping for, but which still left me cold. I did enjoy several parts of this tale, and understand what Walschots was going for; it just
left me too unsatisfied and repulsed by the end for me to say I enjoyed the experience.