Paul Spence's Reviews > Starter Villain

Charlie Fitzer is not living the dream. In short order, his wife left him, his job fired him, his dad got sick and then passed away. Now Charlie is living in his childhood home, rent free, but he is required, by the trust his father set up, to pay all the bills. His half-siblings want him to agree to sell the house and he wants them to agree to put it up as collateral for a local pub he’s trying to buy as being a substitute teacher isn’t living his best life. Things are not looking good but when a stray fluffball (aka kitten) approaches him as he walks home, Charlie picks it up. “When a kitten walks up to you and makes demands, what are you going to do? Say no?” Luckily his cat, Hera, approves of the newcomer.

Charlie isn’t sure of what to make of the woman (Matilda Morrison) he discovers sitting on the front porch. She claims to have worked for Charlie’s Uncle Jake who wasn’t not a figure in Charlie’s life but who recently passed away. Will Charlie attend Uncle Jake’s memorial service? If he does, there will be a nice financial reward. To his credit, Charlie balks a bit but does agree after it’s rephrased as doing a good deed for someone who has no one else. The memorial includes some floral arrangements with “heartfelt” messages from Uncle Jake’s associates and is … “one of the more memorable visitations” the funeral director can recall.

As he approaches his house afterwards, the shit gets real. Luckily the cats were outside. Charlie soon discovers that his Uncle Jake wasn’t just a parking lot tycoon. Nope, Uncle Jake was a supervillain complete with a lair (cool!), minions (but very intelligent ones), and enemies (oops). As Charlie tiptoes through the minefield of his new job and desperately tries to get up to speed, will he be able to negotiate with a new worker’s union, stay ahead of his fellow villains, and not feel inferior to his cats?

As in “The Kaiju Preservation Society,” a lot of the backstory and world building are carried out via exposition but this time it’s Charlie asking questions of his Uncle’s workers. As Charlie can’t be expected to know jack shit about any of this and the snark is toned down a bit, I enjoyed this part more. Yes, Charlie’s initial view of supervillain-ing is “Blofeld with lasers in the villain lair” but as it’s pointed out to him, destroying things gets the government after you while supplying services (sometimes to those same governments) can earn you tons of money. But liquidity is important.

Charlie tries to take all this in and when faced with a villain convocation he realizes what they are up to and quickly stifles it after which “the shit gets real” again. I will admit to applauding Charlie for standing up for himself after figuring things out. He also negotiates well with some of his workers who feel like the oppressed proletariat (and think the fucking cats are fucking C suite management). I had no idea how this was going to end (which I like in a book) and am pleased with the way things went.

Humour abounds – some of which appeared to be gently parodying the villain genre. There is also more than a little scalding social commentary about the 1% (Boomers and Gen X), bro culture (even if they’re wearing expensive suits), and as mentioned earlier worker oppression. Some people also die. Charlie asks a lot of questions but when needed, hand waving and ignoring certain things is employed to bypass some questions that might occur to readers. Yeah, okay it’s not really necessary to know how the most amazing things were accomplished. It was amusing enough to just have them in the book.