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A review by ergative
Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots
5.0
Wow--what a chewy, thoughtful, interesting dissection of the superhero genre. On its surface, this book seems like it's born of a fun but fairly straightforward subversion of tropes: Let's talk about superheroing from the perspective of the villain's side. This is a trope I first encountered in elementary school, in a lovely picture book entitled The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs (Jon Scieszka) told from the perspective of the wolf.
But, slightly deeper, we have the story told not from the villain's perspective, but from the perspective of the villain's henchman. Now, henchmen are the hierarchical equivalent of the superhero's sidekick, and the idea of going down the hierarchy to tell a superhero tale, exploring the tensions between superhero status and sidekick status, is also not new (e.g., the movie Sky High).
Then, there is the exploration of the idea that all those juicy fights and explosions in superhero battles involve quite a lot of collateral damage, and a bunch of people get hurt or killed who no stake in the fight and were just in the wrong place in the wrong time. This, too, is not a new idea--see The Incredibles, and Hancock, which both engage with the cost of superheroing.
Simply putting together these three ideas--villain's perspective, henchman position, superheroes cause damage actually--would be a creative take on the idea, and enough to render this book worth anyone's time. But Walschots scorns such simplistic approaches to writing. So we have further engagements with things that are not limited too the superhero world: The uncertainty of casualized labor (henchmen get short-term contracts through a temp agency and are always hoping to be hired full-time by a villain); the terrible way that a workplace injury can derail a henchman's life (superheroes really do smack those henchmen around), and how it's made so much worse when the villain simply cancels the contract rather than taking care of people injured in the line of duty; the way society views superheroes as knee-jerkingly good, to the extent that the massive damage and injury and loss of life they create--much worse than any individual villain's scheme--are forgiven or ignored or covered up. I'm reminded of the American rhetoric about good men with guns, that somehow doesn't die despite all the news stories of children getting shot and killed when policemen spray bullets all around trying to shoot bad guys.
And then, on top of this all, we have personal stories, about hate and revenge and justice; about loyalty and friendship and how much stress those bonds can withstand; about how supervillains are created in the first place; about how government structures reinforce certain power relations so that they cannot be challenged; about how a lifetime of unthinking adulation can engender behavior that is as villainous as those you're supposed to fight; about how personal goals can interact with, reinforcing or interfering, with larger goals.
And then, right at the end, Walschots reminds us that, even with all this rich consideration of everything I've named above, it's important not to fall into the facile trope of 'villains are good guys, actually'. Because she would never take the easy, shallow trope when she can chew on it more thoughtfully.
But, slightly deeper, we have the story told not from the villain's perspective, but from the perspective of the villain's henchman. Now, henchmen are the hierarchical equivalent of the superhero's sidekick, and the idea of going down the hierarchy to tell a superhero tale, exploring the tensions between superhero status and sidekick status, is also not new (e.g., the movie Sky High).
Then, there is the exploration of the idea that all those juicy fights and explosions in superhero battles involve quite a lot of collateral damage, and a bunch of people get hurt or killed who no stake in the fight and were just in the wrong place in the wrong time. This, too, is not a new idea--see The Incredibles, and Hancock, which both engage with the cost of superheroing.
Simply putting together these three ideas--villain's perspective, henchman position, superheroes cause damage actually--would be a creative take on the idea, and enough to render this book worth anyone's time. But Walschots scorns such simplistic approaches to writing. So we have further engagements with things that are not limited too the superhero world: The uncertainty of casualized labor (henchmen get short-term contracts through a temp agency and are always hoping to be hired full-time by a villain); the terrible way that a workplace injury can derail a henchman's life (superheroes really do smack those henchmen around), and how it's made so much worse when the villain simply cancels the contract rather than taking care of people injured in the line of duty; the way society views superheroes as knee-jerkingly good, to the extent that the massive damage and injury and loss of life they create--much worse than any individual villain's scheme--are forgiven or ignored or covered up. I'm reminded of the American rhetoric about good men with guns, that somehow doesn't die despite all the news stories of children getting shot and killed when policemen spray bullets all around trying to shoot bad guys.
And then, on top of this all, we have personal stories, about hate and revenge and justice; about loyalty and friendship and how much stress those bonds can withstand; about how supervillains are created in the first place; about how government structures reinforce certain power relations so that they cannot be challenged; about how a lifetime of unthinking adulation can engender behavior that is as villainous as those you're supposed to fight; about how personal goals can interact with, reinforcing or interfering, with larger goals.
And then, right at the end, Walschots reminds us that, even with all this rich consideration of everything I've named above, it's important not to fall into the facile trope of 'villains are good guys, actually'. Because she would never take the easy, shallow trope when she can chew on it more thoughtfully.