Although V.E. Schwab’s Vengeful is a compelling, propulsive novel, it is not necessarily an effective sequel to the superior Vicious.
Even though I love almost everything of V.E. Schwab’s that I’ve ever read—A Darker Shade of Magic is my favorite, but The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is fantastic as well, and I also enjoyed Gallant—I put off reading the Villains duology for a while because, despite being a huge Marvel fan for a long time, I’ve burnt myself out on most superhero media. I’ll still watch superhero movies (it’s one of the few genres that everyone in the family likes and can watch together), but I rarely seek it out these days. I’m at the point where I’ll only enjoy myself with superhero stuff if it does something totally different. Happily, Vicious did. It has a dark, cynical edge to it and is populated exclusively by characters who are anti-heroes at best. It’s a superhero story without any heroes, and it’s fascinating. Schwab approaches the superpowers themselves in a way I haven’t seen before, and the warped relationships between her characters—particularly between the dual leads, Victor and Eli—are uniquely compelling. The cherry on the top of Vicious was the complex but perfectly suited interweaving timelines that brought the reader along for a winding journey with an explosive payoff. The story ends in a very satisfying way, and it could easily have been a standalone.
Vengeful is a strange sequel. On the surface level, it matches Vicious. Victor and Sydney seem to be our main characters, Eli is around, some new villains have emerged to replace Serena, and the story jumps around between POVs and timelines just as it did in the first book. However, it doesn’t work as well. At least, it doesn’t particularly work as a sequel.
There are two new characters who dominate the narrative. Although we spend a lot of time with Victor trying to fix the flaw in his resurrection, his is neither the most exciting nor even the best developed storyline. That belongs to Marcella, a new character, the beautiful and power-hungry wife of a mob boss. When Marcella catches her husband cheating, he attacks her and leaves her dead; she is resuscitated as an EO and uses her new, destructive powers to wreak destruction on those who kept her down before setting her sights on power that even her brutish husband couldn’t command. Marcella is a villain, but she is a vibrant, vengeful presence in the novel and it is her glitzy, glamorous path of ashes that moves Vengeful along.
A second new character, June, is an EO with a mysterious power and an even more mysterious past. June is a blank slate when it comes to who, but she is a kickass what. Her past identity is teased throughout the novel, and though we never really get to see who she is or learn who she was before she became this ruthless assassin, we get to see her in action a lot. And she’s amazing in action. June has one of the coolest superpowers I’ve ever come across. Shapeshifters are always interesting, but June takes it to a whole new level. I spent the whole book absolutely fascinated by her, on the edge of my seat to find out who she was and what she really wanted. (Spoiler) The lack of resolution to that storyline is disappointing—we never get her full story, and as far as we are aware, she’s not a character we’ve met before even though a lot of the time it feels like she might be or at least should be—but she’s almost cool enough to get away with it. (Spoiler ends)
Compared to Marcella’s explosive revenge and June’s unexpected abilities, Victor is dull and repetitive in this sequel. I loved Victor in Vicious, loved his moral ambiguity and his combustive rivalry with Eli, so it was a shock and a disappointment to find that I found his bits a little boring. All he does is go from one potential healer to another, fails to be saved, dies a bit, and then repeats the sequence. We don’t need nearly as much of it as we get, but as Victor is ostensibly the main character, he gets it anyway. Unlike in Vicious, which could skip to any point in Victor’s timeline without the slightest chance of losing or confusing me, the trajectory of Victor’s story isn’t as strong. There’s no point to structuring Victor’s story like this here, because it’s pretty much all the same. It doesn’t build the tension or give us a better understanding of Victor. Vengeful, it seems, is structured like this because Vicious was. It worked absolutely brilliantly in Vicious. In Vengeful, it feels like an unnecessarily confusing gimmick.
He’s further unmoored by Eli’s absence. Eli is technically in Vengeful, but not in any major capacity, and he’s a neutered version of Eli. He has been broken, and has lost the terrifying religious mania and self-righteousness that made him such a compelling, effective villain in Vicious. He’s a shell of what he was, and even if he weren’t… Victor has largely moved beyond him, which means that magnetic push and pull between them that was the heart of Vicious is lacking. Eli is more focused on Marcella; Victor is more focused on miracle cures. When they do cross paths, it is because of circumstance rather than because of the elaborate dance that kept them circling each other for so long. There was a lot to like in Vicious, but the Eli+Victor dynamic was top of that list and it’s unfortunate that it’s all but absent in Vengeful.
Any sequel to Vicious should have focused on Eli and Victor. The problem is that their conflict was largely resolved already. Vengeful is about Marcella and June, but because it’s a sequel it needed to shoehorn Victor and Eli in there even though they don’t have to be there for any story purposes. If Vengeful had been its own standalone novel set in the world of Vicious, it would have worked better. Marcella and June did not need Victor and Eli, and Victor and Eli did not need Vengeful.
(Spoilers) Weirdly, Vengeful also feels much less complete than Vicious. While Vicious largely ties up its main conflict and leaves its various characters in places that feel somewhat final, Vengeful doesn’t. The final scene has the air of a cliffhanger, teasing all the things we should have learned about June but didn’t. If I didn’t know that this was a duology, I would be fully convinced that there’s another book coming that would answer the litany of unanswered questions about her. Yes, Victor and Eli’s story is done. But it was done with Vicious. Yes, Marcella’s story is finished. But June and arguably Sydney have so much more to do; there’s so much more to learn about them, and the idea that their story ends with Vengeful is simply weird. It literally never occurred to me that the book would end without my learning June’s backstory, so the fact that it does—and ends with that odd tease—is uniquely disappointing. (Spoilers end)
If Vengeful had been its own thing, not beholden to the characters and dynamics set up in Vicious, it could have allocated all of Eli and Victor’s stagnant, repetitive chapters to fleshing out June so she was as interesting a character as she was an EO. It could have given her motivation that didn’t hinge inexplicably on Sydney, and it could have focused entirely on the parts of the story that really worked: Marcella and June, two powerful and murderous women kicking ass, taking names, and fighting about the best way to do it.
I went into Vengeful wanting more Victor and Eli. I left it wanting less of them. I expected closure from Vengeful but ended with more lingering questions than I’d had after Vicious. I read Vengeful for morally ambiguous supervillains and anti-heroes, and I definitely got that. This is a good book that could have been a great one if it had been its own thing rather than acting as a strangely uneven sequel. It’s not that I wouldn’t recommend it… but I would say that if you were satisfied with the way that Vicious ended, Vengeful is not necessarily a must-read.
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What’s next?
Want more interesting superheroes? Try The Umbrella Academy (graphic novel by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá, show on Netflix), Extraordinaries by T.J. Klune, Super Adjacent by Crystal Cestari, or Not Your Sidekick by C.B. Lee.
Celebrating Victor’s canonization as asexual? You can find more ace heroes in Loveless by Alice Oseman, The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy by Mackenzi Lee, Tash Hearts Tolstoy by Kathryn Ormsbee, and Let’s Talk About Love by Claire Kann.
If you don’t mind blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-but-still-technically-canon ace rep, you can read The Lightness of Hands by Jeff Garvin, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green, Anger is a Gift by Mark Oshiro, Seven Ways We Lie by Riley Redgate, The Red Scrolls of Magic by Cassandra Clare and Wesley Chu, and Radio Silence by Alice Oseman.
I have reviews for V.E. Schwab’s other work: Vicious, A Darker Shade of Magic, A Gathering of Shadows, A Conjuring of Light, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, Gallant, This Savage Song, and First Kill.
Looking for cool shapeshifters? Ness from Adam Silvera’s Infinity Cycle is awesome and of course Mystique from the X-Men is really the shapeshifter template.
Need more powerful women with magical powers that can absolutely break it down? Circe from Madeline Miller’s Circe, Alina from Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone, Isabel and Briony from All of Us Villains by Amanda Foody and Christine Lynn Herman, and Hennessy from Maggie Stiefvater’s Dreamer trilogy might fill that void.
Another strange duology with a book two that’s a good book but a bad sequel is Warcross and Wildcard by Marie Lu.
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