Superweek Spotlight: Vicious by V.E. Schwab

Welcome to the first ever Superweek at Goldilox and the Three Weres, an entire week devoted to superheroes, supervillains, and superpowers! As part of our celebration of all things super, we're highlighting some of our favorite Super Reads that we've featured on the blog.

Vicious is not your normal superhero story. In fact, it's more of a antihero story. It really explores the question about what kind of person you would become if you suddenly develop special abilities. It tells the tale of how two friends, Victor and Eli, become enemies after they develop superhero powers through a pursuit of science and knowledge. The book opens ten years after these experiments and follows a non-linear timeline through flashbacks that are so perfectly done that we can see how their pursuit of power progresses until they are no longer friends but archnemeses attempting to kill one another.

The characters are so complexly fantastic and messed up that you'll end up loving and hating them at the same time. In my mind, Victor and Eli are like Tony Stark and Bruce Banner from The Avengers but if they had had a falling out. They are the kind of friends that are so similar yet opposite in so many ways. They had me hooked from the first page. The truly great thing about this novel is that it makes you think. It makes you wonder about special abilities and what lengths humans would go to become ExtraOrdinary. There's a reason it's one of my favorite books of all-time.

For more on this book, check out this post:

Rose Red's review of Vicious

Add Vicious on Goodreads.

Buy the book on Amazon.