Sometimes you buy a book strictly because of its cover. This is one of those times. Admittedly the cover should have an orange and white kitty on it, and this annoys me, but how fun is this? I’ve never read John Scalzi before, but his brand of quirky SF is exactly the kind of candy book I need in rotation. Starter Villain (TOR 2023) is just fun – from the beginning until the end. Not only is it hilarious and ridiculous in all the best ways, it’s also extremely well-written. Scalzi also seems to recognize the limitations of his readers, or at least my limitations, and this short book is the absolute perfect length.
Our hero (or villain) is Charlie, a laid-off journalist who is recently divorced and trying to make ends meet by substitute teaching. He lives with his cat, but his housing situation isn’t ideal. (No issues with the cat. He adores that cat.) The novel opens with him learning his estranged and filthy rich uncle has died. Charlie makes note of it, but that’s it; he didn’t know his uncle and doesn’t really mourn. Charlie heads to the bank to apply for a loan so he can purchase a local pub; owning McDougal’s is his singular dream. While licking his wounds from a less than productive meeting at the bank, Charlie is approached by a young woman who had worked for his uncle. She makes him a proposition – if he goes and stands at the funeral and meets the mourners, he’ll get a nifty little sum. Not nearly as much as his uncle’s estate is worth and not enough to buy the pub, but a decent amount just for pretending to mourn a dead guy he doesn’t really remember.
Charlie quickly comes to realize his uncle was not just a parking garage mogul; Uncle Jake was a powerful and dangerous supervillain with a powerful and dangerous supervillain island lair, complete with talking spy cats and a unionized dolphin pod. And of course, every dangerous and powerful supervillain has a list of dangerous and powerful supervillain enemies, and since Charlie stood for his uncle at the funeral, they’ve set their sights on the presumed heir to Jake’s empire.
Starter Villain is an extremely quick read that is a lot of fun – in part because I think most millennials would respond to the news that their estranged uncle was a super villain and their housecat is a spy much the same as Charlie.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 