Villain
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.
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Natalie Zina Walschots
Natalie Zina Walschots is a Canadian author whose work thrives in the space where humor meets insight and the ordinary collides with the extraordinary. Raised in a world of stories and small adventures, she developed a fascination with the hidden corners of familiar worlds, the overlooked, the underestimated, and the unjustly treated. This curiosity became the seed for her debut novel Hench, a book that turns the superhero genre on its head by giving voice to those who are usually forgotten, the henchpeople. Through sharp wit and keen observation, she explores power, loyalty, and the absurdities of modern heroism, all while weaving suspense and humor into a narrative that feels startlingly human.
Hench
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.
Hench consists of two books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
