Vicious

As mostly a fanatic of YA literature, I don’t often delve into the world of adult fiction and fantasy, however, every once in a while, I fall off the beaten path and find myself reading something different and more  “mature”. In this case, the book just so happened to be Vicious by V.E. Schwab.

I’ve never read her before, but I’ve heard amazing and prolific things about this author and her books, and especially her ties to comic books and the dramatization of writing. So, let’s get started. 

    This book was good. It was intriguing on a deeper level that I can admit that not all YA books can reach, despite their best attempts. The whole book revolves around best friends and frenemies Victor Vale and Eli Cardale which I will call him For Ever (book joke, sorry, not sorry) that start off as college roomies and then quickly dissolve into antagonistic rivals after Eli’s thesis of creating human beings with ExtraOrdinary superhuman abilities or EO’s for short takes a wrong turn after both Eli and Victor become EO’s themselves. 

    The catch? In order to become an EO and gain these special abilities, you need to die. 

And then come back to life. 

In the book, they call this a NDE-a near death experience. This was actually the most disturbing, but the most interesting part of the book to me, other than Eli and Victor’s complex relationship. In one attempt, Victor overdoses on alcohol and pills. This fails and he gets upset that he didn’t succeed in dying.

In other attempts, Eli freezes himself in a bathtub of ice and trusts Victor to bring him back to life with a series of epinephrine shots. In Victor's second attempt he has a friend electrocute him over and over again using the electrical engineering equipment at their college, which ironically results in her death instead of his. 

  These scenes were brutal to read, but also...fascinating. Harking back to Nietzche’s quote: "If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you". This saying could not be any more analogous for a book like Vicious. 

    As the characters become entrenched in this dying and resurrection process in order to gain powers, they realize that while now Eli can heal himself with impressive and incredible regenerative properties and Victor can inflict and rescind pain from himself and from others, they now lack something intrinsically and inherently human.

They now lack empathy, understanding, the concepts of guilt, shame, connection, or love amongst other things. Multiple times throughout the novel, both Eli, Victor, and other characters notice a distinct lack of something missing, something inside of them having been broken. 

    Eli uses this to set off on a mission that he has deemed been personally given to him by God to eradicate the remaining EO’s first in the city of Merit and then in other cities as he is the only different EO while the others are wrong and alien and evil and therefore must die. Eli is largely successful with this mission until Victor and his sidekicks, Mitchell Turner, fellow inmate, and Sydney Clarke, fellow EO, return to society and plan to track him down and end him. 

    The rest of the story is a series of intermixing layers of different timelines, perspectives, and time shifts that go back in time as far as ten years ago while Victor and Eli are in college to explain the origins as far up to 20 minutes before the showdown in order to build suspense about what is to come and who will come out the Victor (get it?). 

    While I really enjoyed this story and I found the premise intriguing, I also found the addition of Sydney and Serena Clarke as largely unwelcome as really the heart of the story revolves around Victor and Eli’s friendship turned sour and now focused on vengeance. I understand that a lot of what both Eli and Victor plan and accomplish could not have been possible without the sisters, but the interjection of their perspectives was not always welcome to me. 

In addition, at first I enjoyed Schwab’s time shift between ten years previously up to two hours before the event, but eventually I grew tired of the constant back and forth and I just wanted all the puzzle pieces to fall into a nice, linear path. I don’t doubt that it was creative and impressive to write, but as a reader it did get increasingly aggravating. 

    Lastly, while some of the topics in here were deep, they were also...skimmed over? I really felt like the nature of this book was to really analyze the vicious nature of both Eli and Victor and their subsequent ascent and descent into being more and less human after their differentiating near death experiences.

I would have liked to see them more introspective about who they had become, if they were still human, and the overall take on human nature in general-the old age question of what makes us human or monster, but I felt like it was just kind of...said and then left. Moved on from. Like I will move on from this review now. 

Recommendation: This novel was interesting and unique, and while Eli and Victor were engaging characters, I wanted more from them about who they believed they were, their friendship turned hatred, and the forthcoming take on what makes a human being a human being. As Schwab put it: “Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human.” 

Score: 7/10