Villain by Natalie Zina Walschots: Why This Supervillain Sequel Is the Most Entertaining Book of 2026
If you thought the idea of filing expense reports for a supervillain was absurd, wait until you meet the woman running the operation that takes down the entire superhero industrial complex. Villain, the long-awaited sequel to Natalie Zina Walschots' breakout hit Hench, has finally arrived — and it delivers everything fans of the original could have hoped for, and then some. This is a book that manages to be wickedly funny, surprisingly poignant, and genuinely thrilling all at once, wrapped up in one of the sharpest satirical packages that genre fiction has produced in years.
Before Villain: Why You Need to Read Hench First
If you are coming to Villain without having read Hench, stop right here. Go back, pick up the first book, and then return. You will thank yourself for it. Hench introduced readers to Anna, a woman navigating the deeply unglamorous world of temp work — except her employers happen to be supervillains. Think data entry, scheduling, and spreadsheet management, but for people with names like the Electric Eel and Leviathan.
What made Hench so compelling was its insistence on treating the mundane as seriously as the extraordinary. Anna is not a hero. She is not particularly special. She is someone trying to pay her rent, and she ends up working alongside genuinely dangerous people because that is simply where the temp agencies send her. The book became a cult favorite precisely because it grounded its fantastical premise in the exhausting, often demeaning reality of precarious employment. Office politics, HR nightmares, and the slow erosion of dignity that comes with doing work you do not believe in — all of it rendered hilarious and achingly real against a backdrop of capes and catastrophe.
What Villain Is About
In Villain, Anna has come a long way from her temp work days. She has ascended to a position of real power — something close to a second-in-command role within a villainous organization that has set its sights on the most ambitious goal imaginable: the complete destruction of the organization that manages and oversees the world's superheroes. This is no longer about filing reports or fetching coffee. Anna is now in the room where decisions get made, and the stakes have never been higher.
Yet Walschots never loses the thread that made Hench so beloved. Even as the scope expands dramatically, the book retains its razor-sharp eye for the absurdity of institutional life. The bureaucracy of evil is just as maddening as the bureaucracy of any corporation. There are meetings that could have been emails. There are internal politics that rival anything you might find in a traditional workplace. There is the particular torture of being extremely good at your job while working within a system that has its own set of deeply irrational rules.
The Humor That Makes Villain Unmissable
One of the most impressive achievements of Walschots' writing is her ability to sustain a comedic tone without ever letting it undermine the emotional weight of the story. The humor in Villain operates on several levels simultaneously. There is the broad, conceptual comedy of imagining what HR policies might look like in a supervillain's lair. There is the dry, observational comedy of watching extremely competent people navigate deeply dysfunctional organizations. And there is a darker, more satirical comedy embedded in the book's central premise — that the line between heroism and villainy is often less about morality and more about who controls the narrative.
Walschots has a gift for the perfect comic detail, the specific and unexpected observation that makes a scene suddenly snap into focus. Whether she is describing the particular agony of a strategy meeting that has gone off the rails, or the strange social dynamics that emerge when you are the second most powerful person in a criminal enterprise, she consistently finds the exact right angle to make readers both laugh and wince in recognition.
Workplace Satire at Its Finest
What truly distinguishes both Hench and Villain from other entries in the superhero satire genre is the specificity and affection with which Walschots renders the experience of work itself. These are not books that use the office as mere backdrop. The office — or rather, the lair — is the point. The way organizations function, the way hierarchies form and calcify, the way individuals find meaning or lose it within institutions that do not particularly care about them: all of this is taken seriously and explored with genuine curiosity.
For anyone who has ever felt the disconnect between the grand ambitions of their employer and the grinding, often soul-deadening reality of the day-to-day work required to pursue those ambitions, these books will feel startlingly familiar. The fact that the employer in question wants to destabilize global superhero infrastructure rather than, say, disrupt the insurance industry, is almost beside the point.
Who Should Read Villain?
- Fans of Hench who have been waiting patiently for Anna's next chapter will find everything they loved about the first book amplified and deepened in this sequel.
- Readers who enjoy genre fiction that takes its satirical premises seriously — books like The Blighted Stars or the works of T. Kingfisher — will find a great deal to appreciate in Walschots' precise, funny, emotionally intelligent prose.
- Anyone who has ever survived a particularly bad performance review, a restructuring, or a workplace where the stated mission and the actual culture could not be further apart will find a kindred spirit in Anna, even if their own employer has never attempted world domination.
- Superhero fiction fans looking for something that subverts the genre's conventions in fresh and genuinely funny ways will not be disappointed.
Final Thoughts: A Sequel That Earns Its Place
Sequels to beloved cult novels are always risky propositions. The original book's charm often lies in its specificity, its sense of discovery, the feeling of encountering a fresh voice doing something genuinely new. Returning to that world can sometimes dilute what made it special in the first place.
Villain avoids this trap entirely. Natalie Zina Walschots has not simply repeated herself. She has taken the world and the character she built in Hench and found new and unexpected ways to push them both. The scope is larger, the stakes are higher, and Anna herself is a more complicated, more powerful, and ultimately more interesting figure than she was when she was just trying to keep the lights on by answering phones for a mid-tier supervillain.
If you are looking for your next great read — something that will make you laugh, keep you genuinely invested, and leave you thinking about the nature of power, institutions, and the strange ways that ordinary people navigate extraordinary circumstances — Villain belongs at the top of your list. Start with Hench, read it in one sitting, and then dive straight into the sequel. You will not regret it.