When Working for a Supervillain Feels Uncomfortably Familiar
What if the most honest depiction of modern workplace life came wrapped in a cape and a villain's monologue? That's the quietly radical premise at the heart of Hench and its sequel Villain, two novels by Canadian author Natalie Zina Walschots. Part speculative fiction, part sharp workplace satire, these books have struck a nerve with readers who recognize something deeply familiar in their pages — even when the boss in question can level a city block.
In a recent conversation with workplace advice columnist Alison Green, Walschots reflected on why a story about staffing agencies for supervillains resonated so powerfully with so many ordinary working people. The answer, it turns out, says a great deal about the state of modern labor — and about the stories we need to make sense of it.
What Hench Is Really About
On the surface, Hench follows a woman who takes temp jobs in the supervillain industry. The work is unglamorous: spreadsheets, performance reviews, unclear reporting structures, and bosses who are bizarrely invested in how you're feeling this quarter. Sound familiar? That's entirely the point.
Walschots deliberately layered the mundane realities of gig work and office culture over the fantastical backdrop of supervillainy. The result is a novel that reads like a dark comedy of errors — one where the absurdity of institutional life is pushed just far enough to become visible. The protagonist isn't a hero or a villain in any traditional sense. She's a contractor, trying to make rent and navigate a workplace that happens to involve world domination as a line item in its quarterly goals.
The book captures something that few workplace novels manage: the specific texture of working for people with far more power than conscience, and the slow, grinding toll it takes on those beneath them in the hierarchy.
The Sequel: Villain and the Next Chapter
In Villain, which arrived just recently, the protagonist has ascended from temp worker to second-in-command. Her new mission is to dismantle the organization that oversees the world's superheroes — a bureaucratic power structure with its own brand of institutional harm. If Hench was about surviving at the bottom of a broken system, Villain is about what happens when you gain enough power to challenge the system itself.
Together, the two books form a compelling arc about labor, loyalty, and the ethics of complicity. What does it mean to do your job well when your employer is doing harm? At what point does professional competence become moral compromise? These are questions Walschots takes seriously — and her fictional world gives her space to explore them without easy answers.
Why These Books Resonate: The Workplace as a Site of Power
Alison Green, whose work focuses on workplace dynamics and management, was an ideal conversation partner for Walschots — and the overlap between their respective bodies of work is striking. Both are deeply interested in the same cluster of themes:
- Workplace power dynamics: Who holds power, how they use it, and how those beneath them adapt or resist.
- Labor exploitation: The ways institutions extract value from workers while offering insecurity and precarity in return.
- Burnout and emotional labor: The psychological cost of performing competence and loyalty in environments that don't deserve either.
- Institutional absurdity: The surreal disconnect between how organizations present themselves and how they actually function.
- The ethics of loyalty: The complicated question of what we owe our employers — and what we owe ourselves.
Walschots notes that she finds it both "fascinating and hilarious" that a book set in a supervillain's office became so relatable. But she's also clear that the relatability is intentional. She chose to write about the mundane intersecting with the horrific precisely because that collision is where the most telling truths about institutional life emerge.
The Radical Honesty of Supervillain HR
There's a long tradition of using genre fiction to say things that would be too uncomfortable to state directly. Science fiction, fantasy, and horror have always served as vessels for social critique — and Hench and Villain sit firmly in that tradition. By setting workplace satire in a world with superheroes and supervillains, Walschots creates a kind of fun-house mirror. The distortion makes the reflection easier to look at.
In the real world, most harmful workplaces don't look obviously evil. They look normal. The boss who subtly undermines your confidence doesn't twirl a mustache. The company that extracts maximum value from its workers while offering minimum security doesn't announce itself as villainous. It uses the language of team culture, growth opportunities, and shared mission. Walschots' fictional framing strips that language away and asks: what if we called things what they actually are?
What Readers Are Taking Away
The response to both books suggests that readers are hungry for fiction that takes work seriously — not just as backdrop, but as subject matter worthy of genuine literary attention. Too often, workplace life is treated as incidental in fiction, the mundane context through which more dramatic personal stories unfold. Walschots treats it as the drama itself.
For anyone who has ever felt the slow grind of institutional loyalty unrewarded, the quiet resentment of competence unrecognized, or the moral fatigue of working within a system that causes harm, these books offer something rare: the sense of being seen, understood, and — perhaps most importantly — validated in their frustration.
Should You Read Hench and Villain?
If you've ever sat in a meeting that could have been an email, navigated a performance review that felt disconnected from any reality you inhabit, or wondered quietly whether the organization you work for is, in some meaningful sense, one of the bad guys — then yes. Absolutely yes. Start with Hench, which stands confidently on its own, and follow it into Villain for a story that grows richer, angrier, and more ambitious with every page.
Natalie Zina Walschots has written something genuinely unusual: workplace fiction with teeth. And in a literary landscape that often treats the office as scenery, that's a very welcome thing.