Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots

 

This was a fun read, crackling with energy and anger and humor. It's an inverted supers story, where the "supervillains" are at least less dangerous and damaging than (most) "superheroes," but doesn't read to me as any sort of takedown of the genre or anything so much as riffing on some (or a lot) of the tropes, looking at things from a different angle. It *might* be leveling at least some snark on a certain category of supers movie that features all sort of collateral damage. Also at America's "health care system" and possibly at corporate life in general. The characters here are mostly believable, the dialogue tends to sparkle and zing, the prose snaps and dances. There are some minor weirdnesses in the story--at least one bit of "skip ahead and backfill the gaps" that doesn't work as well as it could have--but there aren't really any dead spots pacing-wise.