Sarah O'Connor

“With henching, you know where you stand,” (Walschots 202).

Anna is a hench, meaning she takes temp jobs for the world’s more dastardly (or starting-up) villains to make money. It isn’t honest work, but in this economy a person has to survive any way they can. But once she becomes permanently injured after a well-known superhero wreaks collateral damage during a press conference, Anna is left as one of the “lucky” lone survivors. Now that her employer has laid her off as a result, Anna starts to crunch the numbers and learns that superheroes are actually causing more harm than good which gains the attention of supervillain Leviathan who seeks Anna out to show the world how dangerous superheroes really can be.

I remember when Hench came out in ye olde days of the pandemic and being intrigued by it, not only because of the premise but because the author is Canadian and the book was fairly popular for a time after it’s release. I was happy when my book club chose this as our first pick because it finally gave me an excuse to read it.

The Boys is an excellent comparison to this book because while Hench follows the tropes of a superhero/supervillain story and universe it also parodies it, while taking a look at the gorier side of hero work. Some of the descriptions are incredibly grotesque, especially the fate of one character near the end (if you know you know), which honestly makes sense considering the people doing the damage have superhuman abilities. Why would someone evaporate into dust when being burned with laser eyes when it is much more realistic to have their flesh melted and molded to their body?

Anna was a great protagonist to follow as well. I liked her voice, and I liked that at the start she was such an ordinary character. She was taking temp hench jobs to make money, wanted to go on dates, and was just trying to survive in a world that didn’t want her to get ahead. I loved that she wasn’t secretly special, she was just good at her job and once a supervillain recognized that he honed her ordinary talent into something in his favour.

That being said, Hench wasn’t perfect. I found the pacing at the beginning was good but once Anna was completely entrenched in the world of supervillainy things seemed to move very quickly. One prominent character disappeared and most of the bantery dialogue that took up the first third of the book was replaced with long descriptions to describe a movement of time. I understand Wolschots was following certain superhero/villain tropes, but I felt that a lot of the interpersonal relationships between characters and character development suffered because of this.

Still though, I had fun. I’m not sure if I’ll check out the sequel releasing next year, but Hench was a surprisingly fresh addition to the superhero genre.

Publication: September 22 2020
Publisher: William Morrow
Pages: 403 pages (Hardcover)
Source: Library
Genre: Fiction, LGTBQAI2S+, Canadian, Science Fiction
My Rating: ⛤⛤⛤⛤
Summary:

Anna does boring things for terrible people because even criminals need office help and she needs a job. Working for a monster lurking beneath the surface of the world isn’t glamorous. But is it really worse than working for an oil conglomerate or an insurance company? In this economy?
 As a temp, she’s just a cog in the machine. But when she finally gets a promising assignment, everything goes very wrong, and an encounter with the so-called “hero” leaves her badly injured.  And, to her horror, compared to the other bodies strewn about, she’s the lucky one.
So, of course, then she gets laid off.
With no money and no mobility, with only her anger and internet research acumen, she discovers her suffering at the hands of a hero is far from unique. When people start listening to the story that her data tells, she realizes she might not be as powerless as she thinks.
Because the key to everything is data: knowing how to collate it, how to manipulate it, and how to weaponize it. By tallying up the human cost these caped forces of nature wreak upon the world, she discovers that the line between good and evil is mostly marketing.  And with social media and viral videos, she can control that appearance.
It’s not too long before she’s employed once more, this time by one of the worst villains on earth. As she becomes an increasingly valuable lieutenant, she might just save the world.