Vicious

I finished Vicious angry at almost everyone and unable to stop thinking about it. It came out in 2013 from Tor Books, 368 pages in hardcover. It is the first book in the Villains series. Two brilliant college friends, Victor Vale and Eli Cardale, test a theory that near death experiences can give superpowers. They succeed. Then they ruin each other. Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison to kill Eli, who has become a hero who murders people like them.

If you like superpowers with moral rot, start here. No capes without cost. Every power comes from trauma and leaves a mark.

The thesis

Victor and Eli meet at Lockland University as premed juniors. Victor is cold, pale, and good at planning. Eli is charming, handsome, and obsessed with God and heroes. They share a room, then a lab, then an idea. Eli thesis is that adrenaline plus death plus revival can trigger ExtraOrdinary abilities, EOs. He cites comics and unproven papers. Victor treats it as a puzzle worth solving.

They test on themselves because no one else would allow it. Eli goes first with Victor help. He drowns in a tub, flatlines, is revived. He wakes with rapid healing. Victor goes next with Eli help. He is buried, suffocates, is revived. He wakes able to turn off pain in himself and others, which lets him control nerves and cause agony or numbness. Recovery details matter. Burst eyes. Vomiting. Shaking for hours. They log times and doses like good students, then hide the notebook when Angie knocks. That hiding is the first betrayal, small and telling. Science done in secret stops being science and becomes conspiracy, but neither admits it while high on success.

Their friend Angie, a brilliant girl who loves Victor, helps with monitors. She is the only one who asks if they should stop. They do not listen. Success feels like proof. They test limits in an empty pool at night, laughing, timing revivals. It reads like drunk driving with science. Fun until it is not.

The third test kills Angie. She wants to try after seeing them survive. Something goes wrong with timing. She dies for real. Victor and Eli panic and bury her. They tell no one. Their friendship cracks that night. Eli says God judged her. Victor says they miscalculated. Both are lying to avoid saying they let her die for curiosity.

I liked how Schwab writes brilliance without glamour. Lab notes. Timers. Cold water. Vomiting after revival. Powers do not arrive glowing. They arrive with burst vessels in eyes and piss on sheets. The cost is bodily before it is moral.

Ten years later

The book jumps. Eli is now a public hero in Merit, a city with EO panic. He finds EOs and kills them, claiming God chose him to cull monsters. He works with a woman named Serena who can charm obedience and a man named Asher who phases. He prays before murders. He keeps trophies.

Victor is in prison for something he did not fully do, or did for reasons the book reveals slowly. He gets out with help from Mitch, a huge hacker with a gentle heart who owes him, and Sydney, a thirteen year old girl who died by drowning and came back able to raise the dead briefly. Sydney brought back her sister catcher dog Dol, who follows her everywhere. Victor saved Sydney from Eli men and now protects her in his flat way. He does not hug. He makes sure she eats and sleeps with a nightlight.

Sydney is the heart. She is young, funny, and tired of being treated as a weapon. She brings back dead birds to test limits, then cries when they die again. She likes Victor because he does not lie about being good. He says I am not a hero. She says good, heroes killed my sister friend. Their odd family with Mitch, who cooks and fixes locks, gives the book warmth between kills. Sydney school memories slip in between jobs. A teacher who liked her drawings. A sister who braided hair too tight before a recital. Those flashes remind that she was a kid with homework weeks ago, not a tool grown in a lab.

Victor plan is simple. Find Eli. Kill him before Eli kills him and Sydney. He tracks EO sightings, bribes a coroner, sets a trap in a hotel. He knows Eli heals, so he plans to drown and hold under, to stop the brain without giving revival window. It is cold and careful. It fails because Eli expects it. Heroes learn too. Victor rehearses with Mitch using a bathtub and a stopwatch, learning how long a healer takes to fade. Those practice runs leave both men shaken and silent after. Planning murder like lab work shows how far Victor slid from thesis curiosity to cold procedure. Mitch times without comment, then cooks a large meal no one eats.

Schwab alternates past and present well. College chapters show how Eli faith curdled. Present chapters show Victor jail time and Sydney rescue. The jumps never confuse because voices differ. Eli prays. Victor calculates. Sydney notices dogs and snacks. Mitch worries.

Prison chapters deserve more credit. Victor does not brood in a cell for pages. He trades cigarettes for paper, writes formulas, learns guard rotations, befriends no one. He uses pain control to endure a beating without crying out, which earns wary respect and a worse beating later. Mitch, on the outside, tracks EO news and sends coded legal ads. Their plan takes months, not a montage. When Victor finally walks out in a guard uniform two sizes big, it feels worked for rather than gifted. That patience makes his later impulsiveness around Eli more telling. Careful men make careless choices for revenge.

What worked was pace. Short scenes. Cliff cuts. A lab success ends, cut to a prison fight. A prayer ends, cut to a drowning. I read late because each cut promised answers.

Eli faith and Victor hurt

Eli believes EOs are demons and he is righteous. He cites his own healing as proof God saved him for purpose. He ignores that he sought death deliberately. He ignores Angie. He kills a man who can fly by breaking his neck on camera and calling it mercy. He kills a woman who reads minds by drugging her first. Each kill is planned like surgery. Pray, isolate, execute, clean.

Victor does not believe in God or heroes. He believes in pain. His power lets him turn off pain, which sounds kind until he uses it to torture information from a man by turning pain on and off. He tells himself it is necessary. He tells Sydney to leave the room. She hears anyway through thin walls. That scene made me flinch. Victor is not better than Eli. He is more honest about being bad. After, he sits on a curb with shaking hands and tells Mitch to check Sydney homework like normal matters. It does, and the ordinariness shames him more than blood.

Their final college break is key. After Angie death, Eli frames Victor for attempted murder to test if Victor will use power to escape. Victor does, harming guards in the chaos. Police shoot him. He lives with damage and goes to prison for murder while Eli walks free as witness hero. That injustice fuels Victor revenge more than philosophy. Friends who visited the lab that night remember shouting and water on the floor for years, though reports cleaned it to a simple arrest.

I appreciated that Schwab does not make their debate abstract. It is about Angie. Eli cannot face that he let her die, so he makes EOs evil to justify. Victor cannot face that he wanted the experiment more than her safety, so he makes revenge a project to avoid grief. Both use ideas to dodge feeling. Sydney, who grieves openly for her sister and dog, shows the healthier path without preaching.

Mitch gets a quiet arc. A big man with face tattoos who did time, he could be a stereotype. Instead he cooks, reads manuals, fixes doors, and asks Victor to promise Sydney will not see killing. Victor promises and breaks it. Mitch stays anyway because someone must drive and hold lights. His loyalty is not explained by debt alone. He likes being needed for good, even in bad work. A scene where he teaches Sydney to pick a lock with a hairpin, then tells her never to use it except to help, captures him. Skill shared with limits. Care inside crime.

The hotel and the water

The climax is a hotel trap. Victor lures Eli with a fake EO. Eli brings Serena and Asher. Serena charms Mitch into lowering his gun. Asher phases through walls to grab Sydney. Victor fights Eli hand to hand, both healing, neither yielding. Water matters. Showers, sprinklers, a tub. Drowning is the only reliable off switch, and both know it.

Sydney role turns here. She can bring back the recently dead, but each return costs her life force and risks her own death. She already brought back Dol at cost. She offers to bring back Victor if he falls. He forbids it. She does it anyway when Eli drowns Victor and leaves. She touches his chest, feels cold, pulls him back. It nearly kills her. Mitch carries her out while she shakes. Victor wakes gasping, weaker, owing a child his life.

Eli does not die cleanly. Victor plan to hold him under fails when Serena intervenes. Asher dies. Serena dies when her charm breaks and Victor uses pain. Eli escapes wounded, praying. The book ends not with triumph but with stalemate. Victor alive, Sydney weak, Mitch driving them away. Eli in a church, bandaged, telling followers that Victor is the devil and must be found. Sequel hook set.

That lack of closure frustrated me in a good way. No one learns. Eli faith hardens. Victor revenge pauses but does not end. Sydney, the only innocent, pays most. It feels true to cycles of harm. Stopping would require grief neither man will do.

What dragged was middle repetition. How many EO kills can Eli narrate with prayer before pattern shows. After the third, I skimmed prayers to get to action. Schwab knows it, so she shortens later kills to lines. Still, the point lands early. He kills to feel clean. A side thread with a detective who tracks EO deaths adds procedural balance. She collects coroner photos, maps drownings, notices lake water in lungs far from lakes. Her scenes are brief but give outside eyes on what Eli calls mercy. When she gets too close, Eli charms his way past with a smile and a verse. Her file stays open, which promises consequences beyond Victor revenge.

I also wanted more of Serena as more than charm. She gets a past hint, a brother, a choice to follow Eli for safety, then dies. A longer scene where she doubts would deepen Eli magnetism. As is, she functions as power plus warning.

Still, as a debut of the series, it is sharp. It asks if villains are made by trauma or choice and answers both. Powers do not make monsters. Decisions after revival do. I wanted book two immediately to see if Sydney gets to be a kid, not a battery. On reread I noticed how often characters drink water, fill tubs, watch rain. Schwab soaks the book in the method that made them. Every glass reminds. That quiet repetition does more than thesis talk. It says you cannot wash out what you chose while dry.

Content notes. Near death drowning, suffocation, and revival with medical detail. Gun violence, stabbings, torture via pain control. Death of a college friend. Child endangerment with a thirteen year old in violence. Animal death and revival with a dog. Prayers used to justify murder. Strong language. No explicit sex, though adult relationships and implied intimacy exist. The book keeps gore functional rather than lingering, but the drowning scenes are intense and repeated.