Hench

Anna Tromedlov is a tiny cog in the villain gig economy. Henching means filling out the ancillary roles that make up a traditional bad guy roster. The camera crew that films the dramatic hostage situation, the IT resources hacking into the network feed, the getaway driver at the ready should things go south and Anna, behind the scenes crunching the numbers. But her latest gig drags her into the spotlight and she joins the line of Meat at the latest villain presser, a token diversity prop to better show off evolving bad guy allyship.

In typical hero fashion the uber-hero of the book, Supercollider arrives to save the day but leaves Anna with a shattered femur, incapacitated, jobless and probably never able to walk again without the aid of a cane. While recuperating she starts calculating the cost of heroes in the world and shares the numbers in her tiny blog The Injury Report. The thousands of hours of lost productivity, not just from the Meat horribly injured as the hero sweeps in to save the day but the innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire, the firefighters dying under the rubble of a collapsing building and the millions in property damage. The arrival of Supercollider is akin to a catastrophic earthquake and no less expensive. Heroes are just villains with better PR.

I could go on. What starts out as a clever examination of the hench ecosystem, the oft overlooked infrastructure of villain endeavours which could easily fill an entire novel swiftly morphs into superhero economics drawing on the real-world research of Ilan Noy and his examination of the “Disability Adjusted Lifeyears Measure of the Direct Impact of Natural Disasters”. All carried out by the wickedly snarky Anna and the sharp banter between her and June. But it's also such a perfect office novel once Anna finds herself at Leviathan HQ. Walschots nails the adrenaline and camaraderie of a functioning office in contrast to the psychotic disfunction built mostly on hype and ego of Anna's earlier experiences. Social media and its impact in this new reality is smartly deployed and we still get a classic good guy/bad guy showdown to boot.

This would make a perfect punk rock, alt superhero movie in contrast to the grim bluster of DC and the candy coloured optimism of Marvel. As it stands, it's a near perfect read that is a blistering fastball right down the centre of my own personal strike zone. Worth check out true believers.