Review for Hench: Supervillain HR Departments?

Amidst endless scrolling through my Instagram feed, one book that kept popping up with glowing reviews was Natalie Zina Walschots’ Hench. With absolutely no idea what I was getting into, I assumed that the Goodreads synopsis meant that working with villains meant your average, everyday Cartel members or embezzling CEOs. Instead, I was pleasantly greeted by a The Incredibles-esque world with impervious bodies, superhuman speed and senses, force fields, and elevated intelligence. I was hooked the moment the narrator, Anna, or “The Auditor” as she comes to be known as, notes the menthol jelly underneath her best friend’s nose to cover the immense strength and number of smells someone with superhuman senses must constantly take in.

The setting of the story, then, is an alternate universe in which kids get tested in their early school years for elevated abilities, snatched away from their families if they have them, and sent to superhero school where their entire identity becomes the hero they are trained to be. Those are the kinds of stories that occupy our minds and most of the screen time in films like The Avengers. However, where Walschots enters the chat is in her occupation for the minute. Through her main protagonist, Walschots asks the question, “What does life look like for the henchpeople working beside the villain?” Her answer is clear: it’s just another job. Before working her way up, Anna begins the story as an above-average temp, working as a data entry person for different villains. It’s a fantastic line of thinking that centers around a level of specifics that I would have never thought to flesh out. Think of the creativity in the idea that a supervillain’s “company” could have a payroll, budget, and HR department! Even with henchpeople’s storylines becoming increasingly elevated in recent works, like for Finn in Star Wars: A New Hope, I’ve never seen any with this amount of considerate detail.

More than this, two aspects of the novel struck me most: the suspense and the representation. As Anna is introduced as either a bi or pansexual woman, I thought the novel would follow a common tokenization route but was immediately won over the moment Molly, a non-binary robot, is introduced to the story. After their introduction, I noticed that every single character introduced is given a sexual and gender identity and felt how much care went into each of their creations. It never felt forced and made me gleam with respect for Walschots as an author.

I would also say that one of the main themes of the novel lies in how accessibility works and further highlights how the systems that are supposed to be rooted in the protection of the everyday person (like the Superhero corporation dubbed “Dovecote”) are instead deeply entrenched in inaccessible, able-bodied practices. Through characters like Supercollider, the top superhero of the world, Walschots shows how big systems can be the ones who inflict the most amount of damage under the guise of heroics, which sounds a little too familiar to a few political narratives I’ve heard throughout my years. Even Dovecote's security protocols are rooted in able-bodied procedures, and Walschots drags this fact out, I think, to highlight it as inaccessibility within pervasive systems. It was extremely cool and refreshing to read.

As I previously mentioned, Hench did a beautiful job in crafting a storyline that I could easily follow yet never predict. From the moment Anna is introduced, I genuinely had no idea where her (or the novel’s) storyline was going yet remained intrigued through the little clues that Walschots dropped throughout. Her use of the eucatastrophe nearing the end of the novel was incredibly well executed and perfectly set up. And *Spoiler Alert until end of paragraph*, I loved the idea to take what could have been an out-of-place “enemies to lovers” trope and completely flip it to an “enemies to steal his girlfriend and take him down together as women scorned” storyline.

With a perfectly ambiguous ending that could be both a solid stop or an opening for a sequel, I think this novel is pure fun with a dash of nerdy and splash of thrill. There is a line that one of the characters says in an interview situation where they speak to how a superhero fell out with their spouse. They say they broke up, “for ‘choosing the greater good over doing good.’” This is undoubtedly my favourite moment of the novel that encapsulates the line the story walks throughout, and I would recommend this book for anyone who wants to question what being “good” really means!