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?

In Vicious, V. E. Schwab brings to life a gritty comic-book-style world in vivid prose: a world where gaining superpowers doesn’t automatically lead to heroism, and a time when allegiances are called into question.

I always enjoy V.E. Schwab’s books, and somehow I’ve had the first two in this series sitting on my shelf for years without ever picking them up. With the final book coming out soon, I figured it was finally time to start, and I’m really glad I did.

Victor and Eli met in college. During their senior year, a shared research project into adrenaline, near death experiences, and unexplained phenomena leads them to believe that under the right circumstances, a person could actually develop extraordinary abilities (aka superpowers). When they decide to move that theory from paper into an actual experiment, their theory is proven true, but it’s not without consequences and Victor finds himself locked up. Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison with the plan of tracking down Eli, who he knows is responsible for his lockup and has spent the last decade hunting down and eliminating every other person with powers he can find, all while keeping one enigmatic, fiercely loyal woman by his side. Both men are armed with serious power and headed toward a confrontation that could only end in bloodshed.

This book is extremely well written (no surprise there) and I loved Schwab’s take on how people end up with powers in this world. I’ve been into superhero stories basically my whole life, and her particular spin on the origin mythology felt fresh. What I especially liked is that neither Victor nor Eli is written as clearly good. Eli has convinced himself that anyone with powers (except for himself) needs to be eliminated, while Victor is hunting Eli down for reasons that get murkier the more you sit with them. Is he doing it because he genuinely believes Eli is dangerous and needs to be stopped, or is this really just a personal vendetta dressed up as justice? The book never makes that easy to answer, and I liked sitting in that ambiguity.

My one real critique is that this book reads very clearly like the setup for a much bigger series. A huge amount of time goes into world building and character backstory, and while I enjoyed all of it, the ending lands exactly where I expected it to while also very obviously setting up something much larger down the road. On one hand, that’s a reasonable structure for the first book in a trilogy. On the other hand, if I’d read this back when it first came out and had to wait months or years for the sequel, I probably would have been frustrated by how much setup I got without a bigger payoff. Reading it now, with the rest of the series already sitting there waiting for me, worked entirely in my favor.

If you love morally gray characters, a fresh take on superpowers, and don’t mind a first book that clearly exists to set up something bigger, this is absolutely worth starting, especially now that you won’t have to wait years for all of the books to be completed.

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