Hench is set in a world with a lot of heroes and a lot of villains, and children are tested at puberty to see if they have any powers so that they can be trained to be – ideally – heroes. Anna, the first person narrator of Hench, has been freelancing as a hench for villains for about a year. She’s not particularly invested in the work, but it’s a way to pay the bills because the capitalist dystopia we currently live in is still alive and well in the land of Hench. This becomes a particular problem when Anna is severely injured by Supercollider, one of the foremost superheroes, when he goes after the villain Anna is working for. The medical bills are exorbitant, and while Anna is recovering, she starts calculating the damage that Supercollider has cost her and others, both monetarily and in terms of people’s lifespans. She starts a blog about this, which sets her on a path to go to work for a major supervillain and a quest to start going after heroes, because they’re causing at least as much harm as the villains.
At first, I struggled with the Anna’s ambiguous morality. While I like nuanced characters when I read, I do generally prefer more clear-cut delineations of “good” and “evil.” Anna’s stomach turns towards the beginning of the novel when the villain she’s working for kidnaps a young teenager and is about to have him cut off the tip of his own finger, and I’m thinking, “What did you expect? You’re working for a villain.” However, it turns out the heroes are also morally gray, and as the novel progresses, I can see how Anna is pushed more and more into her own semi-villainy by the callousness of heroes for the damage they cause.
One of the aspects of the novel I most appreciated is its inclusivity, especially of LGBTQ+ individuals. It’s implied that Anna is bi- or pansexual, and there are characters with they/them pronouns. There wasn’t much that I disliked, although some of the violence at the end was disturbing. It was meant to be, but the grotesqueness got to me a bit. There are also multiple examples of a character nearly “choking” (e.g., on coffee) as they laugh at something funny, which was a quirk of the author I could do without, especially when it occurred 3 times in the space of a few pages.
Overall, I enjoyed the novel. I think Walschots is planning to write a sequel, and I’m looking forward to it.
