By V.E. Schwab (Titan Books)
ISBN: 978-1-78329-021-5
Once upon a time the meat and metier of comicbooks – fantastic beings with incredible abilities – was ghettoised: disregarded by the wider world as nonsense for kids and sad juveniles who’d grown older but not “upâ€.
How times change. These days those notions of men like gods – or more likely, monsters – are the bread-&-butter of movies and television: the public has accepted the core concepts of superhero sagas in the same way my generation gradually accepted hand-held communicators, teleportation, time-travel and parallel worlds (thank Star Trek for most of that).
Naturally then, with such fantastic concepts now common parlance amongst society’s hoi-polloi, prose fiction was bound to get in on the act (leaving aside the rare dabblings on the fringes of science fiction such as Wild Cards or Soon I Will Be Invincible) as the “new†genre won general acceptance and gained fictive credence. And eventually, something really fresh and new in the nascent medium of Superhero Novels was bound to emerge…
Vicious is a brilliantly plotted revenge drama dressed up in the supernature pyrotechnics of comicbooks, which wisely leaves aside the more flamboyant aspects of the strips to recount a story of wrongs redressed and vengeance hard-won in the classical manner of the Count of Monte Cristo – or more accurately Alfred Bester’s re-invention of it in The Stars my Destination.
Ten years ago two very special young men met in college: unique geniuses who had much in common. They became friends (in the way Reed Richards and Victor Von Doom or Clark Kent and Lex Luthor did) and together researched the urban myth of EOs – ExtraOrdinary individuals.
Barely believing the tabloid joke, they nevertheless soon discovered such people with their impossibly improbable powers could exist – and how to make them…
As the project began to obsess them, rivalry developed. They both underwent their transformative process and a girl they both wanted died.
Lines were drawn: moody pariah Victor Vale went to prison and charismatic Golden Boy Eli Cardale went free, buoyed up by his new, divinely-inspired mission. But now Victor is out and, with his small gang of similarly empowered EOs, hunting Eli.
His prey is the secret weapon of the Merit City Police Department and a key component in a decade-long case. Someone has been tracking EOs; acting as judge, jury and executioner of these ungodly abominations…
And now, Victor will have his vengeance, no matter the cost…
Comicbook veterans should find enough here to draw them in, but will be stunned as the tale steadfastly refuses to follow the accepted memes of “their†genre or utilise the artefacts (masks, costumes, code-names) that used to set it apart. Film and TV fans might note similarities to films like Scanners or Jumper or shows such as Heroes or Alphas, but the fast-paced, brutal and obsessive tale told here is actually most akin to a western: High Noon…
Antecedents aside, Vicious is a supremely clever, cruelly addictive thriller easily cloaked in the trappings of genre fiction whilst telling a stunningly powerful, wonderfully absorbing horror story of timeless archetypical passions whilst exploring the nature of heroism, villainy, friendship and family.
A magnificent treat for all lovers of the dark fantastic…
© 2013, 2014 V.E. Schwab. All rights reserved.