Vicious — Villains, Book 1

Vicious Review

Vicious is the book that established V.E. Schwab as a writer worth taking seriously, and it remains arguably her most formally accomplished work. The premise — a superhero story in which both the protagonist and antagonist are unambiguously the villain — could easily collapse into clever-for-its-own-sake territory. Schwab makes it work because she is genuinely interested in the ethical questions she is raising, not merely posing them.

Victor Vale and Eli Ever are thesis partners at a prestigious university, competing intellectually and socially in the way that very smart people who respect each other sometimes compete. Their shared research into near-death experiences and adrenaline leads, through a chain of escalating recklessness, to a discovery: people who survive death under certain conditions acquire extraordinary abilities. The nature of those abilities reflects, in Schwab’s telling, something about the person’s psychology at the moment of dying. The implications of this — that powers are essentially trauma given form — run quietly beneath the entire novel.

Ten years later, the structure alternates between past and present. Victor has just escaped prison, where he spent a decade because of Eli. Eli, who calls himself a hero, is hunting down ExtraOrdinaries and killing them, sustained by a religious conviction that he alone is supposed to have survived. The reader assembles the full picture as the timelines converge.

What is most impressive is the restraint. Schwab never tells the reader how to feel about Victor or Eli. Both are given full interiority. Both have logic that is internally coherent. The darkness of the ending is earned rather than imposed.

Reading Order

Vicious is the first Villains novel and should be read before Vengeful. The series is complete at two books.

Reading Guides

• Books Like Good Omens: 11 Novels of Divine Comedy, Unlikely Friendship, and Cosmic Chaos
• Books Like American Gods: 11 Dark, Mythological Fantasies With Big Ideas
• Books Like Assassin
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• Books Like Fourth Wing: 11 Romantasy Reads for Dragon-Rider Fans
• Books Like Red Rising: 12 Brutal, Epic Reads for Fans of Pierce Brown

The Dual-Timeline Structure

Vicious is told across two intercut timelines: the present-day story of Victor’s escape from prison and his pursuit of Eli, and the flashback sequence that reconstructs how two college roommates went from competitive friendship to mortal enemies. Schwab manages the alternation with precision. Each flashback chapter answers a question the present-day narrative has just raised; each present-day chapter intensifies the stakes of whatever the flashback is building toward.

The structure serves the novel’s central argument: that the same sequence of events looks entirely different depending on whose perspective you inhabit. Victor and Eli both experienced the same discovery, the same consequences, and the same decade — and arrived at completely different accounts of what happened and who was responsible. By giving readers both perspectives, Schwab refuses to adjudicate between them. The reader must sit with the discomfort of finding each account internally coherent.

ExtraOrdinaries: Powers as Trauma

The mechanism by which people in Schwab’s world acquire extraordinary abilities is one of the novel’s quietly radical ideas. EOs — ExtraOrdinaries — develop their powers through near-death experiences, and the nature of each power reflects something about the person’s psychology in the moment they thought they were dying. This is not explained explicitly but demonstrated through the characters: Eli’s regeneration reflects his conviction that he is supposed to survive; Victor’s pain-suppression reflects his relationship to vulnerability; Sydney’s ability reflects what she was, at the moment of her near-death, most afraid of losing.

The implication is that extraordinary abilities are not gifts or random occurrences but expressions of the self under existential pressure. Powers as trauma externalized — as the body’s attempt to answer the question the mind could not face — is a premise with real psychological texture, and it gives the novel’s superhero framework a weight most of the genre doesn’t attempt.

Eli Ever’s Religious Conviction

Eli is the novel’s most disturbing figure not because of what he does but because of why he does it. His conviction that he alone was supposed to survive — that his regenerative power is evidence of divine selection, and that other EOs represent a perversion of whatever force chose him — is rendered by Schwab as the logical endpoint of a certain kind of extraordinary self-regard. He is not cruel for pleasure; he is cruel because he has constructed a framework in which cruelty is duty.

The novel is clear that this is pathology. But it is also careful to show how the framework was built, how Eli’s intelligence and self-certainty made it possible, and how a person could arrive at these conclusions starting from premises that are not obviously deranged. The most frightening element of Eli is not his power but his sincerity.

Sydney Clarke and Secondary Depth

Mitch and Sydney — the two characters Victor accumulates on his way to confronting Eli — function partly as instruments of plot and partly as the novel’s emotional anchors. Sydney in particular, a twelve-year-old who should not be alive, is given enough interiority to matter without the book making her arc the central concern. Her relationship with Victor is one of the novel’s most interesting dynamics: a man who claims to feel nothing protecting someone he clearly values, for reasons he cannot or will not articulate.

A Career-Defining Work

Vicious was published in 2013, Schwab’s fourth novel, and it announced the arrival of a writer operating at a level beyond her previous work. The precision of the structure, the moral seriousness of the premise, and the sheer entertainment value of watching two extraordinary people try to destroy each other — all of it combined to establish Vicious as the book that would define Schwab’s voice across her career. The sequel, Vengeful, arrived five years later in 2018 to complete the Villains duology.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.4/5 — A masterwork of moral complexity: Schwab writes two antagonists so compellingly that ‘villain’ and ‘hero’ become genuinely meaningless distinctions, and the dual-timeline structure — cutting between past and present — maintains pressure from first page to last.