The Boys meets Assistant to the Villain in the electrifying, sharp, violent, and hilarious sequel to the highly acclaimed novel, Hench. Filled with a queer and neurodiverse cast, Villain asks the question: what happens when a diabolically brilliant henchperson looks back at their already storied career and thinks, I can be so much worse.
The hench once called Anna, now known to her colleagues and enemies as the Auditor, has carved out a wicked name for herself. Any superhero unlucky enough to cross her path knows her potential and powers. Surely, her recent success should taste sweet: she has an incredible job with lots of perks, her boss will literally annihilate anyone who crosses her, and her greatest enemy, the former hero Supercollider, has been utterly defeated—literally ground to a still-living pulp.
But the Auditor still has her sights set on a greater work: destroying The Draft, the organization that makes, trains, and manages the world’s most powerful superheroes. These “heroes” have shown time and time again that they do more harm than good (she has the spreadsheets to prove it), and now is the time to stop the damage at its source.
Yet all is not well for the Auditor and her fellow evildoers. Her employer, Leviathan—the world’s most feared supervillain—is not coping well with Supercollider’s defeat at someone else’s hands. As their relationship deepens, her work-life balance increasingly involves navigating the feelings of someone who doesn’t believe they have any. Moreover, her unlikely ally and unexpected friend, Quantum Entanglement, has reappeared, forcing the Auditor to confront all the ways they deceived each other. Tension and uncertainty haunt the Auditor, and the fear that their triumph is about to crumble looms over all of them.
The Auditor soon finds herself facing down an opponent unlike any she’s taken on before—not another superhero, but someone like her, someone much more dangerous: The Draft’s Chief Marketing Officer. Their conflict isn’t a test of physical prowess, but ideas, and as their fight escalates, she'll need more than preternatural pattern recognition, data analysis, and a horrific imagination to meet this challenge. It’s guerrilla ad warfare, and the Auditor might have finally met her match.
The series
In a world dominated by superheroes, the people in the shadows are finally stepping into the spotlight. The Hench series follows the lives of those who have always been overlooked, the henchpeople tasked with doing the dirty work while the heroes take the glory. Sharp, irreverent, and often darkly humorous, the series peels back the glittering facade of heroism to reveal a world of ambition, exhaustion, and the high cost of loyalty.
Read full series description
The first book, Hench, introduces a world where supervillains and superheroes alike rely on armies of faceless underlings, but one henchperson begins to see the cracks in the system and asks what it really means to be expendable. The sequel, Villain, pushes this exploration further, examining the moral compromises, betrayals, and unlikely alliances that emerge when the ones who serve start to fight back. Each installment combines tense action, witty observation, and human vulnerability, creating a universe that feels lived-in and surprisingly grounded even amid the chaos.
At the heart of the series is a keen focus on perspective. The narrative gives voice to those usually silenced, blending sharp satire with an empathetic eye on the struggles of ordinary lives caught in extraordinary circumstances. Readers are drawn into a story that is as much about the people behind the masks as it is about the heroes and villains themselves, with each chapter revealing new layers of ambition, humor, and moral complexity.
The Hench series stands out for its unique approach to the superhero genre, turning expectations upside down while maintaining a narrative that is tense, clever, and compelling. Fans of darkly humorous speculative fiction, character-driven stories, and narratives that challenge traditional power structures will find themselves immersed in a world that is both entertaining and thought-provoking, with every book expanding the scope of a universe that refuses to let anyone remain invisible.
Be the first reviewer
Sign in and write the first reader review.
