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What it argues
Vicious follows Victor Vale and Eli Cardale, two college roommates who discover through a thesis project that near-death experiences can create ExtraOrdinary humans — people with abilities. They use this knowledge to create those abilities in themselves. What should be a triumph breaks their friendship completely, and ten years later Victor escapes from prison to kill Eli, who has been using his own extraordinary ability to hunt and murder every other ExtraOrdinary he can find.
The novel is told in non-linear chapters that alternate between the college backstory and the present-day confrontation, and Schwab uses that structure to control when the reader understands each character's motivations. Both Victor and Eli believe themselves to be the protagonist of a story about stopping a villain; the reader spends the novel deciding which framing is closer to correct and arriving at the unsettling conclusion that both men are wrong about themselves in different ways.
What it gets right
- 1.
Both Victor and Eli are wrong about themselves and right about each other. Schwab keeps both sides of that equation in view throughout, which is harder than it sounds.
- 2.
The ExtraOrdinary abilities are personality made literal — defined by what the character feared or wanted at the moment of near-death. That connection between psychology and superpower is the novel's best structural idea.
- 3.
The non-linear timeline is used to manage sympathy. The order in which information arrives changes how the reader aligns with Victor versus Eli. Rereading is rewarding.
What it covers
Who wrote it
V.E. Schwab (Victoria Schwab) is an American author who writes across multiple genres, including adult fantasy, young adult fiction, and middle grade. She is best known for the Shades of Magic series, the Villains duology of which Vicious is the first entry, and the Cassidy Blake middle grade series. Her adult fantasy work is notable for moral ambiguity, non-linear structures, and a deliberately cinematic pace. She has sold over two million books worldwide and lives between Edinburgh, Scotland, and the United States.
