Vicious by V. E. Schwab

Authors tend to make morally ambiguous characters the antagonists. This is not the case in Vicious. This is a story about vengeance of the most malicious kind. Vicious is a book of varying evils; no one is the hero of this story. V.E. Schwab takes you on a journey unlike any other in a world not too different than our own.

Superhumans are far from a new concept. People with extraordinary powers are a common theme in pop culture. They are usually portrayed as heroes, people who use their unusual talents to aid people in trouble. Schwab takes the concept of the superhuman for her story, but not the hero that usually comes along with it. The superhumans that Scwab writes for us are not the ones we are used to seeing. ExtraOrdinaries, also known as EOs, are people who have survived a near death experience. These people are not the same as they were before they died. Not only do they gain some sort of power, which is linked to their personality and mental state during their near death experience, but they lose part of themselves as well. What they lose is attached to their moral compass; they lose some of the emotion and empathy that makes them a regular, emotional human.

The way this story is written reminds me of a large jigsaw puzzle. Each chapter is a new piece falling into place. You don’t get a lot of information at once; it is slowly pieced together as you read chapter by chapter. Only once you have multiple pieces fit together,do you start to see the bigger picture, and the bigger picture is fascinating. Schwab does a wonderful job of snaring you from the first chapter and keeping you interested and invested until the very end. The plot is a hunt, but instead of hunter vs. prey, it is hunter vs. hunter. It is a game of chess played between multiple people where the losers die. Will Eli's plan to eliminate all EOs succeed? Or will Victor's elaborate plan of revenge come to fruition?

Both of the main characters of Vicious, Victor Vale and Eli Ever, are twisted and evil in their own way. Victor is the protagonist, but that doesn't make him a good man. From the moment Victor is introduced, it is easy to tell something is not quite right with him. He is intelligent, highly calculating and manipulative; the type of person who plans ten steps ahead. He is very likely a psychopath before he becomes an EO and definitely a psychopath after he becomes an EO. He spends the entire story planning vengeance against Eli and uses every resource available to him to do so. Eli, while intelligent, is different from Victor. Even though Eli has a dark part of him before he becomes an EO, he is not the calculating psychopath that Victor is. If Victor wasn't a factor in Eli's life, Eli would probably be somewhat successful managing the dark part of himself during the time before he became an EO. Glimpses of Eli's zealous personality are seen before Eli becomes an EO, but it becomes the core of his personality after he becomes an EO. He becomes the very image of the crazed serial killer, zealous and fanatical about his work. He ritualizes the stalking and killing of other EOs. Eli claims they aren't natural, that they're no longer human. However, Eli rationalizes that he is different and he needs to continue his work because God keeps him alive instead of taking away his gift. Each of the characters supporting Victor and Eli during the story have an important role to play in the setup and the plot. Like the main characters, they are all varying degrees of twisted and evil. Except the dog. The dog is just a nice nod to the church grim. Unfortunately, I feel they are a little too closely tied to the plot to really delve into them in this review.

This book is a twisted masterpiece; I honestly have never read anything like it. V. E. Schwab ensnares you in such a way that you find yourself rooting for characters that, in a regular story, you would want to fail. I highly recommend this book to anyone willing to pick it up.