Everything's connected, and it's all fucked up.
Six years ago, Hench appeared, the first book in this very fine exploration of the nuances of villainy, and the dangers of knee-jerk support for institutions we are instructed to regard as the good guys. How much of superhero vs. supervillain is good vs evil, and how much is merely antagonist against antagonist? Even if we flip the good/evil spectrum, how many of the superheros are actually baddies, and how many of them are mere victims of the self-serving machinations of their institutional overseers?
Villain picks up where Hench left off, with our narrator, Anna Tromedlov fully embodying her new name of The Auditor. She has become Leviathan's right-hand woman; she runs the organization in his name while he plays dead, and drives policy when he returns to the job. As Leviathon’s team continues its conflict with the Draft – the institution that controls and organizes superhero activities -- her relationship with him develops along lines that would be tedious and predictable if they were so gosh-dang thematically grounded: What types of intimacy can define relationships, and how do they interact with institutional control? This book refuses to offer any easy answers. It’s all kind of fucked up. And, to misquote Tolstoy, exploring the domains and degrees of fucked-up-edness is where all the fun lies.
Let’s take the question of intimacy. Nemeses are very explicitly presented as if their mutual hatred behaves exactly like love. After any superhero’s death, the funeral events traditionally include a Night Service, during which the venue is left symbolically locked and unguarded at night. This allows villains to symbolically break in so that they may pay their own respects. Everyone recognizes that nemeses, like allies, need to mourn. And the Auditor does mourn: I wish we had more time, she thinks during Supercollider’s Night Service. I could have hated you so much longer. She feels hollowed out by his loss: A deep sense of loss sloshed around in my chest. Without Supercollidor to focus on, there was a great void left behind, a huge volume of hatred without a focal point. Replace 'hate' with 'love' and this could be the ending of any tragic romance.
The Auditor is not the only one to feel this way. Leviathan is utterly undone by the loss of Supercollidor, spending the first several chapters of the book, Achilles-like, sulking in his office. During the Night Service itself, Doc Proton, a token hero left behind to guard the venue, can be soothed only by the intervention of Decay, his own nemesis, into whose arms he collapses in tears. Later, Leviathan explains the nature of this intimacy during a conversation about the combativeness developing between the Auditor and an ex-hero, named Decoherence. ‘The greatest divisions are a single degree from perfect understanding,’ he says. ‘She could be the great hatred of your life.’ And he says it with a degree of jealousy, because her recognizes that the intimacy between nemeses can be a genuine obstacle to the more conventional romance he wants to pursue with the Auditor. After all, he himself was not able to consider such a thing until now, after Supercollidor is dead.
But what does this kind of intimacy entail? Leviathon is not the best romantic partner, in ways that could be a reflection on types of coercive control in domestic relationships, but which I myself find much more interesting to interpret in light of his role as the boss of a vast institution. Don’t date your coworkers, and definitely don’t date your manager, amirite?
Personal/institutional power relations are the other thematic pole of this book. To what extent do individuals have power over their own lives in a world controlled, surveilled, and manipulated by institutions? The Draft kidnaps any child with supernatural ability, and indeed will disappear non-supers as well, if they have useful skills. The deeper you are enmeshed, the less control you have, until eventually people become indistinguishable from the forces they serve. We see this process in action everywhere. ‘Mom’ – an aspiring leader of the Draft – has no private life outside of work, and no weaknesses that Leviathan's team can exploit to interfere with his quest for institutional power. The auditor of the Draft, who aspires (and fails pathetically) at being the Auditor’s nemesis , tells her at one point, ‘This isn’t about work. This is about you…’ to which the Auditor reflects, I wasn’t sure I even made such a distinction anymore.
The role of chosen names is a really lovely detail that ties into the nuances of this point further. Decoherence has adopted her new name after leaving the Draft – and her Draft identity of Quantum Entanglement – behind. A team of young heroes include Thundersnow, whose name arouses repeated comment, to which she always replies simply 'I’m Canadian'. A new teammate of Thundersnow's is transferred over from a previous team of fascistic bullies, among whom he bore the name Riot Shield. (A wealth of commentary on how purportedly good institutions like to whitewash appalling violence in that detail alone!) Now, to distance himself from that previous role, he calls himself simply Shield: pure protection, no fascism involved.
But how much of this nomenclatural flexibility represents actual control over one’s individual life, and how much is merely window-dressing for the deeper control that institution exert over everyone in their power? Thundersnow never says actually, call me Susan. She can choose her name, yes, but only as long as it fits the theme of superhero names, consistent with the role the Draft has chosen for her. The reason Decoherence is still involved in this whole mess is because she recognizes that the heroes of the Draft are victims as much as they are perpetrators of evil, and wants to persuade them that they can just leave (more on that in a moment).
Even the Auditor herself shows that this phenomenon is not restricted to Draft-affiliated individuals. When she attempts to make contact with her best friend from civilian life, she has to go back to calling herself Anna, and has to work through some Feelings at realizing that this name no longer fits. Only her institutional name is an accurate description of the person she is now.
At the Night Service, Decay warns the Auditor of the danger of dissolving oneself into one’s role. Her face is not known yet, he tells her. She is not a symbol of Leviathan's institution yet. She can still walk away. She can still detach herself, live her own life, be her own person. She refuses this path – only to be offered it later, by Mom. Except this time the opportunity is no longer a genuine personal choice. Mom shows her a spreadsheet, in which all the damage she has done acting for Leviathan is weighed against the future good she could do if she leaves . She doesn’t even need to join the Draft, Mom says – she can join an NGO and live an independent life, doing good to balance the scales she has so badly tilted during her time working for Leviathan. Like the names, though, this offer does not represent genuine autonomy. The very existence of the spreadsheet shows that any future good works a hypothetical ex-Auditor might carry out will always be under scrutiny and evaluation by the Draft. It’s just a more palatable version of the Draft’s desire to control every individual’s behaviour.
A third invitation to leave comes from Decoherence – not as a representative of villains, like Decay, or as a representative of heroes, like Mom. Decoherence has no use for any of those: ‘Fuck all of them,’ Decoherence says. ‘Leviathan and the Draft are just opposite ends of the same fucking spectrum.’ Decoherence wants to be truly, properly independent, and she wants the Auditor to join her. Although Leviathan sees her as a prospective nemesis to the Auditor, Decoherence and the Auditor dance around the friendlier side of that spectrum in most of their interactions.
Love, hate, intimacy, control, institutions, autonomy – it’s all interconnected. It’s all fucked up. This book does not shy away from exploring how, and why, and it does not propose any solutions. To the very last sentence, all it can offer is the opportunity to understand the problem.
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The Math
Nerd coefficient: 9: very high quality/standout in its category
Highlights:
- Squishy, nuanced exploration of themes
- Pretty awesome superhero vs. supervillain spectacle
- Messed up romance
Reference: Walschots, Natalie Zina. Villain. [William Morrow, 2026].
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative or on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social.
