A Bona Fide Cocktail of an Antidote to 2018: VE Schwab’s ‘Vengeful’

The moment Marcella Morgan melts the face off her husband in VE Schwab’s Vengeful you know you’re in for a veritable five-course feast of a treat.

She lifted an empty glass from the table. “To my husband,” she said, right before the ruin rushed to her fingers in a blossom of red light.

Five years in the making, Vengeful is the delectably dark sequel to Vicious, now a cult classic among bibliophiles the world over.

A bewitching love-child of the X-Men and Hannibal, the Villains duology revolves around the mythic rivalry between Victor Vale and Eli Ever, the morally grey Superman and Lex Luthor of this extraordinary world.

Vicious begins with two supernatural humans unearthing a corpse in the cemetery of the fictional city of Merit. Victor Vale is ghostly, imperious, and pale, with white-blonde Spike-esque hair and an acute control over the sensations of living beings around him tangled into his pulse. In the same breath, we learn both that Victor has just escaped from jail and that the 13-year-old girl he is with has been shot. Eleven-like Sydney Clarke hangs on his every word and is undoubtedly the scene-stealer of the first book. The cast is completed by the towering tattooed computer genius Mitch, whose unassuming appearance curses him with a life behind bars, the frosty seductress Serena Clarke, Sydney’s massive hound Dol, a handful of impressionable police officers and college acquaintances, and Victor’s best friend-cum-arch nemesis, Eliot Cardale.

Eli is just as much of a Slytherin as Victor, but has a different secondary house, hiding his morbid fascination with the monstrous behind a congenial facade of good looks and affable charm, that is until he dies and morphs into a murderous zealot obsessed with his crusade against other unnatural EOs.

This pursuit of EOs, or ExtraOrdinaries, begins as Eli’s college thesis, towards which Victor is drawn like gravity. And while Eli discovers the precise combination of trauma and fear needed to trigger these supernatural mutations in people who go through near-death experiences, it is Victor who comes up with the idea to attempt to create one, to become one. And so the epic rivalry is born. No one writes cerebral supervillains quite like her.

Vengeful picks up five years after Victor sent Eli to jail by manipulating the latter to murder him. The Avatar-esque final scene of Vicious saw Sydney resurrecting Victor from the grave in an echo of the season 6 opener of Buffy. But something went wrong. While he still has his ability to fatally hurt and control the nerves of others, this deadly electrical charge has become a ticking time bomb inside him, exploding out at increasingly frequent intervals and rendering him dead for several minutes. His obsessive quest throughout book 2 becomes seeking out every EO who could possibly be able to heal him. Sydney, Mitch, and Dol follow him across the country on this all-consuming mission, bonded by experience into an unorthodox but tight family unit. But Sydney has been hatching her own schemes after she returned to the scene of her sister’s murder to gather up what remains of her burnt corpse. She carries these fragments of bone around in a small red tin as she begins to hone her power. One of her most deliciously disturbing moments occurs when Victor gives her an unusual birthday present.

Syd knelt at the table and held her breath as she lifted the lid. Inside, nested in velvet, lay the skeleton of a small, dead bird. No feathers, no skin, or muscle–only three dozen attenuated bones perfectly arranged in the narrow blue folds. Mitch cringed at the sight of it, but Sydney rose, clutching the box to her like a secret.

“Thank you,” she said with a smile. “It’s perfect.”

While Victor and his entourage hunt for a cure, Eli Ever finds himself interred in a new secret government organisation named ExtraOrdinary Observation and Neutralisation, or EON, entirely at the mercy of the sadistic Doctor Haverty, who is intent on unlocking the genetic secret of his regenerative power. Haverty performs unanaesthetised vivisections on the perennially conscious Eli, pulling a John Ford when he even removes Eli’s heart and holds it before him, blood streaming onto the floor as another grows in its place.

Dissect—that was the word for it when the subject was dead. Vivisect—that was the word when they were still alive. But when they couldn’t die? What was the word for that? Eli’s faith had faltered in that room. He had found Hell in that room.

And here may we bow down before the genius of Schwab, because by the end of Vicious I was utterly reconciled with the prospect of Eli just rotting away in jail. I had of course enjoyed witnessing the breakdown of his humanity and his spiral into fanaticism, but I was simply less interested in him as a character, turned off by his solely religious motivations. Let me tell you, then, how positively flabbergasted I was to discover myself entirely rooting for him in Vengeful. The emotive, contextualising deep dive into his past puts me in mind of Holland’s arc in Conjuring of Light, and it is quite frankly some of the most compelling writing I have ever read.

Once upon a time, when the marks on his back were still fresh, Eli told himself that he was growing wings.

After all, his mother thought Eli was an angel, even if his father said he had the devil in him. Eli had never done anything to make the pastor think that, but the man claimed he could see the shadow in the boy’s eyes. And whenever he caught a glimpse of it, he’d take Eli by the arm and lead him out to the private chapel that sat beside their clapboard house.

Eli used to love the little chapel—it had the prettiest picture window, all red and blue and green stained glass, facing east so it caught the morning light. The floor was made of stone—it was cold beneath Eli’s bare feet, even in summer—and there in the center of the room was a metal cross, driven straight down into the foundation. Eli remembered thinking it seemed violent, the way the cross broke and split the floor, as if thrown from a horrible height.

The visceral horror of this violent, twisted childhood rooted in abuse and indoctrination is wrought in blood and gold. It makes for an intense catharsis.

Sometimes Eli thought he deserved it. Needed it, even. He would step up to the cross, and curl his fingers around the cold metal, and pray—not to God, not at first, but to his father. He prayed that the pastor would stop seeing whatever he saw, while he carved new feathers into the torn wings of Eli’s back.

The brutality crescendos until Eli suddenly finds himself with the opportunity to send this monster crashing down the stairs. He patiently waits until the light leaves his father’s eyes before calling an ambulance.

Eli sat on the porch steps and looked up at the sky.

It was a beautiful night, the strobe of red and blue lights painting the house, the lawn, the chapel.

And then he is forced to spend years moving from home to home in a nomadic patchwork adolescence that he takes as an opportunity for observation, as the sociopathic outsider forever looking in through a frosted windowpane.

Eli didn’t know what normal was, or even what it looked like. But he’d spent a lifetime studying his father’s moods and his mother’s silences, the way the air in the house changed like the sky before a storm.

This is one of the most painfully relatable introspections I have ever read. As someone who was dragged between multiple homes and schools in four different countries before the age of 7, I also really get this progression.

The children at this new house still called him names, but the names had changed. Timid, quiet, weirdo had been replaced by strange, curious, intense.

Again, I will remain forever in awe of how V took me from not liking Eli at all to identifying with him the most.

What elevates Vengeful, for me, above even Vicious, however, is the introduction of not one, not two, but three new iconic queens. While Sydney follows Victor, she begins to exchange texts with the mercurial and mysterious June, who encounters her on one of their stops. June has one of the most fascinating powers yet in the form of a shape-shifter ability to take the appearance of anyone she touches. The sheer extent of this power is realised when we discover the bodies she mimics do not become her own, she cannot feel through them, and if they are injured or even killed, they become a voodoo doll for the real person wherever they are. At one point June gets shot and she shifts into a different body as whoever she had stolen the previous one from drops dead of a gunshot wound. As she develops this relationship with Sydney, she becomes more and more distrustful of Victor, so when she crosses paths with a new supervillain on the rise in Merit, she takes the opportunity to start plotting against him.

And so we have Marcella Morgan, mob wife turned serial killer after her husband tried to murder her in a vicious fistfight that ended with their house burning down on top of her. Her final thought, the maniacal promise that becomes the axiom at the heart of her power? I will ruin you…

Marcella is the personified epitome of 2018. After spending years as the glorified trophy of her crooked husband, relentlessly sidelined, belittled, and patronised by the leaders of Merit’s gangs, she finally finds herself in a position to exact some truly stunning revenge. Hell hath no fury… Thus, she becomes the Cersei Lannister of this world.

The last two men stayed seated at the card table, their hands up and their faces frozen. All Marcella’s life, men had looked at her with lust, desire. But this was different.

This was fear.

And it felt good.

She took her husband’s seat, settling in among his still-warm ashes. She used a kerchief to clear a streak of him from the poker table.

“Well?” said Marcella after a long moment. “Deal me in.”

At first, I was a little conflicted by her endgame, but I actually think I really like what this could mean for a potential sequel. At the core of her character was her desire for vengeance, and once that was satiated she lost her gravitational relativity, though thanks to the biblical showdown we never did find out what she was announcing… The truth is, she’s nowhere near as smart as June, and I now want to know ALL about the latter and her past after those enticing teasers we glimpsed throughout, from the ginger curls of her true form to her signature musical accent. My theory is that she’s actually Scottish. Evidence: “shite”, and the fact that V also described Scottish as musical in City of Ghosts.

It was similarly a source of unending satisfaction to see Sydney growing into her agency and her power.

Tears threatened to spill down her face. She fought them back.

“Hey, are you okay?” asked a guy in a cape, kneeling beside her. “You want to call someone—”

“Fuck off,” said Sydney, marching down the steps, her face on fire.

And her new look… steel-capped military boots with three-inch soles and a rage-red deep-pocketed bomber jacket. Her obsession with bones is irresistibly perfect, how she can’t touch corpses without bringing them back to life, so here are these little pearly fragments, this death she can hold in her hands. It’s so messed up – I’m obsessed.

My predictions then for a book 3, one day in the hopefully not too distant future, are that with Eli’s body on ice, Syd will revive him, either because she has turned against Victor for some reason or because she needs help facing an even greater threat. I would find a Syd/June rivalry most compelling, given the latter’s betrayal of the former. I love the idea of June being the stand-out star supervillain of the third instalment. She spent most of the second in Marcella’s shadow, and we as yet know nothing of her past, so there are myriad threads to unpack here, especially given she just erased herself from EON’s records. I also would love to see Syd finally making the decision to revive Serena, perhaps in a moment of intense existential weakness or desperation. The latter could then compel her to revive Eli. Also, Victor will likely continue Haverty’s research and get a handle on his illness. And we now have the revelation of Rios out there as yet another factor on the board. She is especially intriguing as she seems entirely driven by the desire to protect and serve, which we have yet to encounter in an EO. I suspect she will become the new director of EON. So, Villains #3, perhaps with a title of Vindictive or Visceral or Victorious, could have Big Bads in the form of Sydney, June, Rios, Victor, and even Eli and Serena…

Vengeful has undoubtedly been one of my soul-soothing obsessions this week, along with Killing Eve and A Simple Favour, a bona fide cocktail of an antidote for the absolute shitshow that has been the news in recent days (if you’re reading this from the future, I am of course referring to a certain lowlife’s embattled nomination to the US Supreme Court, backed by the Misogynist-in-Chief).

As Schwab put it to Den of Geek:

“Vengeful is a 2018 reaction to a 2013 novel… Vicious is a highly masculine book about toxic masculinity, about identity and obsession, love and hate and friendship and rivalry. Vengeful is a book about all of that and about the ways that women are stripped of and re-take power in the world.”

Can’t wait to see the 2020s or 2030s reaction to the 2018 novel…