Amazon Cover
Starter Villain by John Scalzi
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Inheriting your uncle’s supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who’s running the place.
Charlie’s life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan.
Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie.
But becoming a supervillain isn’t all giant laser death rays and lava pits. Jake had enemies, and now they’re coming after Charlie. His uncle might have been a stand-up, old-fashioned kind of villain, but these are the real thing: rich, soulless predators backed by multinational corporations and venture capital.
It’s up to Charlie to win the war his uncle started against a league of supervillains. But with unionized dolphins, hyper-intelligent talking spy cats, and a terrifying henchperson at his side, going bad is starting to look pretty good.
In a dog-eat-dog world…be a cat.
MY REVIEW
A Whole Treat
Scalzi knows how to create imaginary worlds where an every-man protagonist moves through the “crazy” with grace and common sense to the amusement of his readers. Starter Villain is a perfect example of his mastery of the humor science fiction genre. I wish his worlds featured women with more agency, but I understand the author is basically doing a self-insert into the fantasy world so the main character will be male for him based on his usual style of writing.
Starter Villian is a fun, light-hearted romp with all the cool gadgets and villains of James Bond. Plus a layered plot, complicated characters, and dense world-building which is only noticeable after the fact when you go “I need to make this review longer, was the book actually good, not just enjoyable?” So yeah, the icing is pretty and the cake is fantastic.