Hench

You know a book is good when you put it down after finishing a four-hour marathon read from beginning to end and simply go, Wow.

I have always loved stories about imperfect people, especially in a superhero context. Stories that explore the grey areas of personality and the fact that very rarely is someone all good or all bad. Very rarely does a villain not have some kind of backstory that explains why theyve made the choices they have. Hench is just one such exploration, and Walschots does it masterfully. I hate to compare Hench to other things, but if I had to go with modern literary sales pitches, Id say it is Megamind meets The Boys.

Atmospherically, the book is kind of dark, without straying into grimdark. Its not a warm-fuzzies kind of story. But to balance the darkness, Walschots weaves in wry humor and thoughtfulness that is so kind its almost painful, knowing that that kind of kindness might just be the most fantastical element of the whole story.

The characters all feel like real people, the kind of people who end up in places they maybe didnt expect, but one way or another here they are because bills have got to be paid. Anna is very relatable, and I can really sympathize with parts of her story.

But what I really loved, was that its practically competence porn. Shows like The West Wing are enjoyable to me because I love witnessing excellent people do excellent things. Theres nothing more satisfying than a job well done. And Anna is very competent. Its a dream watching Anna accomplish many things, and do it all beautifully well. Thats not to say shes perfect, mistakes arent made and everything goes without a hitch what a boring book that would be. But Anna is good at what she does.

Hench is such a good read. I laughed and cringed and couldnt put the book down as I raced the clock to the end. And even once I was done, my mind just kept chewing on this scene or that. Its so good.

What if it was up to the villains to save the world from the heroes? Call it a satirical impulse if you like, but what the author of this amazing debut novel is arguing is that we live in a world so far beyond satire that even our fantasies have become meaner and more desperate.

Anna, our narrator and millenial Everywoman, is living hand to mouth as a temp worker; her latest assignment, as an assistant to a second-rate supervillain, ends when the World’s Greatest Hero steps in, leaving several people dead and Anna disabled, unemployed, and effectively homeless. With nothing to do except the math, she logs on, crunches the numbers for days, and asks: Aren’t superheroes more like natural disasters than persons? Don’t their actions literally create more problems than they solve?

The novel charts Anna’s evolution from crackpot conspiracy theorist to arch-nemesis, and the quiet miracle of HENCH is that it manages to make the choice of embracing the dark side seem perfectly reasonable (organized evil sure does have good medical benefits). Note, too, how Anna’s supervillain name, first hurled at her as a sexist insult, then taken up as an office joke, eventually becomes a name even her enemies respect. You gotta love that.

There’s a lot to enjoy here, not least the novel’s diversity — the cast is full of nonwhite, queer, and nonbinary characters — but also the way the story is built on a philosophical foundation of the problem of evil. That’s a problem (liberated from its theological context) of value judgments, free will, and right and wrong actions. Objectively: how many lives (innocent or not) and livelihoods do superheroes cost? Subjectively: what if the line between good and evil is a matter of marketing?

The geeky comic book fans of forty and fifty years ago now run the entertainment industry, and I’m surprised only at how few prose novels about the superhero milieu ever get noticed outside of an SF niche. The last one to get mainstream exposure that I remember, Austin Grossman’s SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE (2007), stil follows what you might call “the unwritten rules,” in which superbeings can bust up a city block in a fight without inflicting a single civilian casualty, and there’s certainly no one tallying up that story’s property damage and job losses. Grossman’s novel was probably supposed to be seen as a satire, but as I said, we live in a world beyond satire. Graphic novels like WATCHMEN, THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, and WANTED (I don’t mean the insipid movies that went by those titles) demonstrate that when you do add up the civilian casualties, your superhero satire turns into a horror story.

Maybe the lesson of HENCH is that nothing beats the power of rage, except rage coupled with brains. Or is it that nothing damns us more deeply than the longing for a better world? It’s a grim little fantasy, perfect for our grim little times.

First, this is just a wonderfully compelling read — outside of work, I have the attention span of a meth-addicted fruit fly, and I couldn’t put this down once I started. It’s just flat-out fun, provided your sense of humor runs a bit dark.

It starts with the familiar “what if superheroes really existed?” trope, but takes an interesting spin on it — how easy it is to hide the real costs of something that is sold as a public good. The novel winds up a weirdly compelling blend of competence porn, career novel (some of Anna’s management techniques seem like good ideas), superheroes, tenderness, found (and lost) families, and social critique. Think a more millennial (and morally ambiguous) version of “Leverage” meets “Velveteen vs.”

Aaargh, I feel like anything I say in this review is going to make it sound awful and preachy, but it’s funny, touching, and very, very angry in all the right ways, while also being incredibly entertaining. (Trigger warning for body horror, though.)

In a media landscape overflowing with superhero stories, looking at you marvel, DC etc… HENCH gives us something a little different. Anna Tromedlov doesn’t test as superpowered, doesn’t posses a quirk, isn’t the test subject of a super serum experiment she is a temp. Well educated, experienced with navigating the processes and software of the modern world. She just happens to be employed as a temp by supervillains. I imagine they pay better than the sanctimonious superhero organisations like ‘The Draft’ and certainly less nauseating to work for.

So you can imagine when the world’s apex hero Supercollider attackers her employer and injures her, ending her employment, her medical bills and frustrations pile up.

Anna uses her skills to pull together the ‘injury report’ which highlights to dollars and ‘lifehours’ how much these heroes cost society more than the crimes the supervillains commit.

This helps her find new employment with the Uber-supervillain ‘Leviathan’ who thanks to his resources, her own impressive skills, and hatred of Supercollider finds a more effective way to end a hero’s journey, slowly and painfully.

There are all the trappings of the genre, the fights, the hi-teck gadgets and cars, and the faceless muscle nicknamed in this story as ‘the meat’, and of course the supporting Henches. Not henchmen as thankfully gender parity seems to an accepted principle after all when one of her fellow henches states “Anna we’re the bad guys” Anna replies “That doesn’t mean we’re inconsiderate dicks”.

Anna’s growth as a character and the prices she pays for that growth, the cast of supporting characters and their individual traits and stories puts this well above a lot of the narratives that feature spandex in the descriptions. Also any Author who includes a Farscape quote by the protagonist knows the way to get my attention.

A great read that I hope will make anyone who reads it a bit kinder to any temps they work with, now excuse me I am off to play Evil Genius on the computer.

This is just the novel for 2020 in its complete and utter nihilism. In the fantasy world of the plot, rage and a savage desire for revenge are seen as the only legitimate responses to a corrupt system. We are supposed to identify with the first-person narrator and her ability to destroy people’s lives through the use of data bases and a huge corporate structure run by a super-villain, because reasons, and they deserve it. She has done the math and determined that super-heroes cause endless amounts of damage and suffering, but somehow doesn’t think to do the same calculation for her (literally and unabashedly) evil employer. All pretenses to virtue are mere posturing and bad faith – there’s no such thing as real heroes, because being an actual hero is too hard to be achievable, so we might as well all be “honest” about our villainy. Anything else is mere self-delusion, so why not just cut loose our inner psychopath?

Frankly, the television series *The Boys* explores this trope much more successfully, and if you want to read a book which might actually help you through these difficult times I recommend *The Plague* by Camus, which recognizes all of our existential limitations without descending into this puerile foolishness . There’s a reason he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, which is not something Walschots needs to worry about.

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