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Eli and Victor are young, astute college students with ambitious plans. They are best friends, despite their obvious differences, and persistently endeavor to one-up each other. The only existing conflict at the time is Victor’s jealousy of Eli’s girlfriend Angie. For their thesis, they choose to explore the topic of EOs. EOs are viewed as outcasts in their world with supernatural abilities that aren’t glorified like in the Marvel universe, but feared. They construct a theory that EOs can be fabricated from near death experiences and Eli decides to evaluate the theory, ignoring Victor’s warnings. When Victor finds him practically dead, he decides to attempt to nearly die as well, roping Angie into helping him. Naturally, his plan is flawed and while he still achieves his goal, Angie is killed, landing Victor in prison. Prison should be dangerous for a young, wiry man like him, but he presently discovers that he has obtained the ability to control the volume of pain someone feels, allowing him to mute his own and increase others’. Eli, on the other hand, can heal himself. 

Like a festering wound, the hatred between the two does nothing but grow during the ten years that they don’t see each other, giving them plenty of time to plan their revenge. Following the death of his girlfriend, Eli decides that EOs are an abomination and starts rigorously serving God by killing them, despite receiving religious trauma in his childhood. He believes it was “meant to be” for him to become an EO so he could rid the world of other EOs, which does nothing but nourish his already massive ego. His savior complex reassures him that he is the hero of the story, and because Victor wants to stop him, he is the villain by default, especially considering the fact that he controls pain and Eli heals. 

After breaking out of prison with the help of another inmate, Mitch, Victor begins searching for Eli. Instead, he finds a young, abandoned EO girl named Sydney with a terrible wound. Victor mutes her pain and cares for her. He helps her experiment with her power, which is to bring back dead things. Victor attempts to juggle his found family while plotting to murder his mortal enemy.

Most superhero books are feel-good stories with boring characters and strict lines defining right and wrong. Vicious has nuanced, well-developed characters and bountiful moral ambiguity. I found myself viewing the characters as people, rather than roles, with motives that were so much more compelling than morality. I perpetually found myself questioning a hero’s defining traits versus a villain’s defining traits. While Victor’s motives were purely selfish revenge and Eli’s were slightly egocentric but predominantly to serve a greater cause, Victor was written like a hero and I found myself rooting for him. Furthermore, I enjoyed the addition of the character Sydney because she served as a redeeming quality for him while throwing a curveball into his nefarious plan and raising the stakes. It was entertaining to watch him struggling to decide between his selfish goals and her well-being. However, while Vicious is thrilling and has impossibly high stakes that maintain my interest, nothing is in chronological order. The book opens with a captivating grave-digging scene that is cut off and doesn’t recommence until halfway through the book, after a backstory from ten years ago and a moment days ago, causing a bit of confusion. However, I didn’t find myself waiting for a specific perspective or time to occur. The backstories, even though I was aware of how the characters would turn out eventually, still interested me as much as the present did. Finally, the ending gave the perfect amount of closure that left me satisfied but still with enough loose ends to keep me theorizing. Every character, no matter how minor, had a moment of agency. Out of ten, I would give Vicious an 9.

I would recommend Vicious to anyone who enjoys science fiction, fantasy, and books that make you question who to root for. 

Check out Vicious at the Newport Beach Public Library!