Creating a universe involves inventing lots of little problems, and the solutions here don’t disappoint. Still, the pleasure of the novel is the slow rollout of the rules. Dragged down by long action sequences, and without a glimpse of the outer world - no panorama of civilian desperation, no Gotham on the verge - it becomes less a subversive take on power and more a straightforward comic book story. The novel works well as a piece of office satire but loses its way in the last third as it refocuses on the undoing of Supercollider. Leviathan is a sensitive guy with an old grudge toward Supercollider, and wants Anna and her data to help take him down. The armor conceals deep hurt, it turns out. It’s simply a fine place to work and Leviathan himself is fair and generous, if demanding. It’s utopian, creating the expectation of Anna’s eventual disillusionment, of rot at the foundation. There are benefits and opportunities for advancement, free chai in the break room. His employees live comfortably on campus. Like working for a tech giant with the mandate to Be more evil, a job at Leviathan Corp.

He has phosphorescent armor, a pet iguana with its own staff, and a mouth appendage that bends around a coffee mug “as delicately as the mandibles of a crab.”

“The currency was years of human life.”Īnna’s research attracts the attention of the world’s worst supervillain, an insectoid named Leviathan, “the monster lurking beneath the surface of the world” who recruits her to come work at his sprawling compound. “I realized there was a whole system devised to describe such forces, and what they cost,” Anna thinks. Laid up on a friend’s couch for months, she starts researching the total amount of collateral damage Supercollider has caused others, publishing her findings online. While henching for a middling villain called Electric Eel, Anna has a run-in with Supercollider and ends up with a shattered femur. The most powerful of these is Supercollider, a sentient battering ram of blond hair and wide shoulders. In Natalie Zina Walschots’s witty and inventive first novel, these workers are treated as expendable, often melted or bisected in crossfire, ground under the boots of superheroes in the name of law and order. The catch is that Anna is a villain’s henchman, or a “hench,” one of the countless factotums, gofers, grunts, peons, warm bodies that villains use to do their evil bidding. She doesn’t have enough money for groceries and struggles to “ward off scurvy.” Millennials, man. She does mostly data entry, lives on the margins, shows up for interviews in ill-fitting clothes. Anna Tromedlov is a freelancer employed through a temp agency.

Hench by natalie zina walschots