Villains

Villains is the superhero world created by V.E. Schwab in her Vicious and Vengeful duology — following Victor Vale and Eli Ever, two brilliant college students who discover that near-death experiences can create people with extraordinary abilities, and who conduct the experiment on themselves with consequences that destroy their friendship and set them on a decade-long collision course. Schwab examines what it means to have power, whether it corrupts, and whether the conventional distinction between heroes and villains has any moral substance.

Schwab's world-building premise — EOs (ExtraOrdinary people) created by surviving death — is elegantly simple and thematically rich, allowing her to explore different kinds of power and how different personalities are shaped by what they survive. Victor and Eli are two sides of the same ambition, divided by a fundamental difference in how they understand what they have become.

The duology is among Schwab's most formally ambitious work — the non-linear narrative structure, which cuts between present action and backstory with careful precision, reflects the way the past and present are equally determining in a story about people who cannot escape what they did to each other.

Begin with Vicious (2013) and read Vengeful (2018) second.