Starter Villain by John Scalzi – Review

Published: September 19, 2023

Publisher: Tor Books

Series: N/A

Genre: Science Fiction

Pages: 264 (Hardcover)

My Rating: 4 Stars

Synopsis:
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, hyperintelligent 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.

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As I have grown to expect from John Scalzi, Starter Villain is a raucously hilarious story that entertains even as it provides scathing social commentary. Similar in overall tone to The Kaiju Preservation Society, Starter Villain follows a young-ish man going through a rough patch in life who’s thrown a bone in the form of an odd opportunity. Rather than visiting an alternate dimension full of kaiju, this book follows Charlie who has just inherited a very unusual business from his late, estranged uncle.

Charlie Fitzer was going through a majorly bad time – he lost his job as a journalist, recently divorced, and barely able to cover the bills on his substitute teacher’s salary. He comes home one day to a woman informing him that his late and very wealthy uncle had left him some money in his will, on the condition that Charlie attend the funeral, accept sympathies, and be present during the cremation. What Charlie didn’t expect was the oddity of the funeral and then all the exceedingly strange things that followed. Turns out, Charlie’s uncle was a villain. A real life Dr. Evil type villain with his own volcanic lair and an army of intelligent cat spies. And Charlie is his heir.

What unfolds is absolutely hilarious and absurd, which is precisely what I expected. This was made even better because I wisely picked up the audiobook narrated by Wil Wheaton who does a fantastic job with this type of character narrative. He add just the perfect amount of disbelieving snark to everything *chef’s kiss*. This is quite a short book and what little information I’ve given is enough without spoiling anything. Needless to say, if you’ve enjoyed Scalzi’s other books and find you enjoy his characters you’ll probably like this one just as much.