Rating: ★★★★★
Author: V.E. Schwab
Title: Vicious
ISBN: 1250183502
Genre: Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction
Publisher: Tor Books, 2018
Page Count: 384 pages
Synopsis: Victor and Eli started out as college roommates--brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong. Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison, determined to catch up to his old friend (now foe), aided by a young girl whose reserved nature obscures a stunning ability. Meanwhile, Eli is on a mission to eradicate every other super-powered person that he can find--aside from his sidekick, an enigmatic woman with an unbreakable will. Armed with terrible power on both sides, driven by the memory of betrayal and loss, the archnemeses have set a course for revenge--but who will be left alive at the end?
Some quick trigger warnings to note: violence, self-harm/mutilation, and potential dubious consent.
The Plot
Vicious is the examination of heroes and villains and how they're misrepresented and twisted. The heroes are reverential and god-like, the villains are reprehensible and devilish. But all those who have had the power to be both are just as infallible as humans. They aren't locked into an alignment the moment they wake with their newfound strength. They are forced to make decisions along the way, as if every second of their life still counts on the same scale as "natural" mortals.
The book's structure focuses on time jumps that I think were executed really well. Not once was I confused or having to flip back to make sure I understood where it picked up. The pacing of the writing, and the varying length of the chapters also helped make this an easier and quicker read than I expected. I also appreciated how the present-day chapters were quite short, before leading up to part two, as it reflected a lot of how Victor is less interested in the methodology to get somewhere as he is in the end goal. The beginning of the story and the end held a much greater weight for him than the two to three-page chapters between where he's with Mitch and Sydney taking baby steps to find his way back to Eli.
Additionally, Schwab does a phenomenal job examining villainy and heroism in Vicious, focusing on how every gift is also a curse. So, let's talk about those.
The "Gifts"
Schwab carefully considers who her characters are before she grants them any power. The way Serena was tired of fighting others and simply knew she didn't want to die by the hands of mother nature, granted her charisma and compulsion control over others and ultimately herself. The way Sydney kept searching for the words come back come back come back only to find she could raise others from the dead. The way Eli manifested his own prophetic immortality by thrusting all of his fanatic faith in God. Or the way Victor wanted nothing more than to be more than Eli, more than all of his abandonment and lack of sheen never granted him, and learned how to harness pain as a weapon.
Eli and Victor manifested their own fates, experimenting on themselves until they created manufactured powers. While most ExtraOrdinaries were made from near death experiences that traumatized them, Eli and Victor weren't traumatized by experiences they created. It was what they were left with that scarred them more. Schwab takes each main EO character and illustrates just how damning superpowers can be, even if they seem like incredible gifts.
Victor Vale
Victor, a young adult who spent most of his life deriding the existence of those around him and born into a negligent family, received a gift that is a weapon and a means to help others. He can turn his power like a dial, absorbing pain or giving it, as he saw fit. And for someone who was so hellbent on revenge toward Eli, Victor spent most of his time conserving his strength and taking pain away. He's not a monster, but he sees himself as a villain because he knows he's certainly not "good". For Victor, he reflectively lives on a constant spectrum of black and white while others can see his grey.
"No, Sydney," he said. "I need you stay here." "Why?" she asked. "Because you don't think I'm a bad person," he said. "And I don't want to prove you wrong."
I loved seeing how he connected with others. For much of his time with Eli at university, Victor was in quiet competition with him over Angie, over schoolwork. He was a boy who never got attention and was "best friends" with someone who always shined like a golden star. But Victor and Eli were never friends. In many respects, I don't believe Victor had friends. It's a complicated web they wove born of mutual respect, but Victor's constant, internal derision, made it difficult for him to truly connect with someone. He seemed to connect with Angie, but his possession of her read less like admiration and more like another competition he had lost with Eli.
Victor was not a fucking sidekick.
However, Victor is a different man ten years later. He's spent time in prison, made an associate out of Mitch, and now had a young girl and a zombie dog following him around. The ways he encouraged and spoke to Mitch were far different than how he ever spoke to Eli. In moments where Mitch was uncomfortable by the silence growing around him, Victor would extend himself to fill the room with small talk. Even if he was "using" Mitch's abilities for his own gain, he had learned in his time with Mitch how to be a companion and roommate in a way I don't believe he ever truly could be for Eli.
His youth spent with Sharpie marker on his hands, blotting out his parents' self-help platitudes published in print, were about his rebellion and disdain for a life he was never granted or that didn't appreciate him. When he set out to make himself into an EO, he did so with the desire to finally be more. What it gave him was a stronger sense of pain, and one he could only escape through sheer force of will.
(Also Victor is hot. There, I said it.)
Eli Cardale
Eli was always hiding scales under his skin, using Angie and academic prowess and God as shields so others wouldn't see him for who he is. He connected with Victor because their sharp edges pulled them closer like a magnetic puzzle. But his complex relationship with his faith and those around him granted him a "chosen one" archetypal complex that only further muddied his place in the world. He believed it a gift from God, because God didn't intervene, but God never granted him the ability. And it's another example of how fanatic faith forgoes the free will the Bible says we all have. If God didn't strike him down, like an Old Testament sinner, he was right. Eli had always been a man teetering on the edge of the simplest of terms, and he only needed the smallest encouragement to topple down.
"Wouldn't You?" He cut deeper, through to bone, over and over, until the floor was red. Until he'd given his life to God a hundred times, and a hundred times had it given back. Until the fear and doubt bled out of him.
I feel as if I have less to say about Eli than I do Victor, but so much of Eli churns on the same point throughout the book, which isn't a fault of the character's development. Seeing exactly how he came to convince himself of his own purpose was fascinating and beautifully done. There's so much darkness that hovers over Eli, but for most of the book he is a bit of an impervious enigma, whereas so much more of the book sits in Victor's perspective. I don't mind this imbalance, personally, but it does mean that this section of the review is shorter.
His relationships with others are the most interesting. I loved his relationship with Serena. I loved watching her play this succubus who gets under his skin to get what she wants while also testing and teasing him because she knew he'd be the one person who would try to stubbornly resist her compulsions. Serena, with Eli in particular, is witty and intelligent and fun to read. Especially in the moments where Eli was threatening to kill her and bedding her in the next scene. I also appreciated that Schwab didn't pretend the dubious consent didn't exist for Eli and Serena, but to what extent Eli continued being with her is a bit unknown, outside of the moments where she used her power against him. In all honesty, I might give this one a 4.5, because while I appreciated the way Eli's position in the world was framed with the self-harm and pleading with God, I didn't feel as though we learned anything else about him after that point. He and Serena were left mostly unexplored in the "present" timeline, while Victor continued to be developed in nuanced ways.
The Themes and Motifs
Most of Vicious focuses on the motifs of smiles and masks, with the themes of honesty, abandonment, and what lies beneath. I don't have much to say here that I feel I haven't already touched on above, but I loved diving into a book where no character felt truly trustworthy (other than perhaps Sydney). Every character's motivations and actions were sharp, devious, self-serving, and self-fulfilling.
Is it dark academia?
I can see why there's the tendency to want to put this on dark academia book lists, but I do wonder how many listicle authors have just regurgitated that from other lists without really considering why it may or may not be classified as such.
In the end, I don't think this is actually dark academia. Eli and Victor's academic theorems, which lead to these damned experiments, start within university. However, those plot beats could have come from the workings of a budding professional who is still enveloped in scholarly/research-based work. The academic setting didn't feel like a connecting piece other than a plot device to confirm why Eli and Victor were toying with such risky research in the first place.
Dark academia, traditionally, focuses on the academic setting/lifestyle and how it completely enraptures and swallows the characters within it, in beautiful and devastating ways. Most of Vicious doesn't have a heavy focus on academia at all. It's the backdrop to Eli and Victor's world ten years prior, but it never feels like a major character in the story, and it certainly doesn't make much of a difference later. There's nothing Vicious does that provides satire or otherwise commentary on the experiences of academia.
While it does show the lengths two students will go to to prove their theories correct, I wasn't convinced that Eli and Victor weren't driven by the manic study of their work. Their personalities were always driven by "what else is there" and "what more can I be", and it existed before and after university. More so, circling back to my point about the varying lengths in chapters and how that reflects Victor's own process, Victor and Eli never seemed fevered by the desire to learn and grow within their research more than they were just desperate to find and answer and execute. Though, after discussing it with my book club, I can understand how stories like this (and even Frankenstein still have a marked place in dark academia, with the latter I think having a stronger argument). It just doesn't work for me as a classification.
With all of this said, I think it's no surprise that I loved this book. I can't wait to pick up its sequel, Vengeful.
Have you read Vicious?
