Hench

The madcap rage of life under vigilante rule.

Natalie Zina Walschots’s debut novel HENCH is fantastic, funny, furious and fucking amazing. It is a profound and moving story about justice wrapped up in a gag about superheroes, sneaky and sharp.

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Anna is a temp who works for supervillains, doing data-entry. She’s economically marginal, but enjoys the camaraderie of her fellow villain temps, and she gets to work from home, massaging spreadsheets in her pyjamas, dressing up in villain-chic for temp agency cattle calls.

But then Anna gets a solid gig working for The Electric Eel, a villain who really seems to value her skills and insists that she come with him to a press-conference where he will unveil a new super-weapon.

Even after she learns she’s only been brought along so that the Eel’s hench backdrop will look more diverse thanks to her token female presence, she’s excited to be there.

Until the superheroes arrive.

While Supercollider — indestructible, irresistibly powerful — is kicking six kinds of shit out of Eel’s hired muscle, he incidentally knocks Anna aside, throwing her across the room with so much force that her femur is irreparably shattered.

Maimed, broke (the Eel lays her off once it’s clear her injuries will take months to heal), evicted, and dependent on a fellow hench for a couch to recuperate on, Anna grows obsessed with the collateral damage wrought by superheroes.

A data analyst at heart, Anna begins building actuarial tables that tally the life-years and dollars that heroes save when they fight supervillains, and compare them to the cost in lives and dollars from the damage that heroes wreak in their careless battles.

The conclusion is inescapable: heroism is a destructive force that costs us more than it saves, but a long chalk, with that cost measured in human lives and destroyed homes and livelihoods.

At first, Anna’s blog documenting her findings is dismissed as the ravings of a crank, but as statisticians independently verify her findings and other survivors of hero incidents come forward, she gains notoriety, then fame.