As promised, here’s a slightly expanded version of the review I started writing for the NYTBR before learning that it had already been covered by someone else. I just want everyone to read this wonderful book.
I expected Natalie Zina Walschots’ Hench (William Morrow, hardcover, $27.99) to be a high-concept, light-hearted punch-up, the literary equivalent of leaning back and putting your feet up on the desk of superhero movie franchises. It surprised me completely.
Anna Tromedlov is a hench, a temp-agency worker who does data entry for supervillains. Her fellow temp and best friend, June, has minor superpowers; Anna is just good at spreadsheets. But when Anna is drafted into being part of the televised entourage for a small-time supervillain named the Electric Eel, things turn suddenly, shockingly dark, and a glancing encounter with big-name hero Supercollider leaves her with a shattered femur and six months of convalescence.
Maimed, unemployed, and living on June's couch, Anna becomes obsessed with cataloguing the damage heroes do to civilians, and as she crunches the numbers, begins to see superheroes in terms of natural disasters. To June's dismay she begins publishing her findings on a blog, and draws the attention of Supercollider's nemesis, Leviathan, who offers her a job — not another temp contract, but a permanent salaried position, with benefits.
There’s just so much here. It’s so unusual to me for superhero fiction to really dwell in the reality of disability, the utter grinding mortality of enduring injury; even with the top-tier health insurance and physical therapy Leviathan provides, Anna will always walk with a cane. Everything feels hyper-real without ever turning cynical: this is a book allergic to flinching, and will instead zero in on conflict, contradiction, hypocrisy, and examine them with startling honesty and compassion. Anna’s friendship with June is acerbic, difficult, and furiously loving; Anna’s relentless self-awareness is refreshing. This is a book that loves women and values women’s relationships with each other, glories in their complexities and challenges, makes narrative meat of them, and demonstrates their capacity for devastating, identity-shaping heartbreak.
Hench could have remained the bleak comedy about offices and the gig economy that its first 30 pages offered, and I would have been perfectly content. Instead, Walschots delivers a book that’s dark and honest, sharp and raw, full of visceral tenderness and breathtaking insight. Hench belongs in a lineage of superhero prose fiction that includes Robert Mayer’s Superfolks (which it surpasses) and Samit Basu’s Turbulence (which it equals), and is one of the best books I read in 2020. I rarely hope for sequels to books that function beautifully as standalones, but am actively longing for one here.
I really enjoyed Hench with remarkably few quibbles (I sometimes feel like I quibble with everything these days), and extremely hope for a sequel (or two!). It feels like Robin McKinley's Sunshine to me in terms of stand-aloneness; it sets up further story, I want more loose ends tied up, but I won't love it less if that doesn't happen.
I read it with The Space Between Worlds still on my mind and those are very interesting when placed together. I file my books (& cds, when I still kept cds) by association in a way which is probably inscrutable outside my own head, but I would probably place Hench between The Space Between Worlds and The Refrigerator Diaries ('would', as I don't presently own hard copies of any of the above). I am extremely here for these brilliant, furious novels commenting on modern employment, office, temp, & gig jobs, class, disability... They're incandescent and they make space for something inside me to unclench enough to think about screaming the way that they scream.
I read it off of your recommendation on twitter, and even if none of the above was true it was so worth it for the disability rep. I don't even know how to talk about that, it was so vital.
Also, love me a bisexual character not afraid to lust over a variety of pretty people and get crushes on awesome folks readily & often. Also love that [spoiler] she doesn't actually have sex with any of them; I feel like 'mostly happy to lust from afar' & 'events intervened and that's so not the priority' are things which also don't get enough rep! That's another thing I really appreciated about Hench & The Space Between Worlds - good disaster bi rep! In quite different ways.
Part of me is just completely boggled by having what feels like really relevant representation in all those ways. It's so wonderful and flabbergasting to read books that look and feel like me and my friends and communities? (Diverse & queer & disabled & struggling & badass & so, so full of wrath.) It's just amazing and I love it so much.
Oh my god Amal, this sounds amazing and like something I need in my eyeballs RIGHT NOW I mean you know my life and I'm having FEELINGS without having actually read the book.