★★★★☆ Deceptively simple

Starter Villain

John Scalzi

Starter Villain has two characteristics that I like in a novel. First, although the plot is ostensibly complicated, at its core there is a simple story (see spoiler below). Second, nothing is as it first seems. For instance (I can mention this because the publisher's blurb and cover give it away) the two cats that Charlie adopts at the beginning turn out to be "sentient, language-using, computer-savvy cats". Also, it is often funny. For instance, I enjoyed this conversation with the funeral home director just before his uncle's funeral,

I smiled at this and then motioned to a standing spray that featured red roses and lilies, with “Dead? LOL okay” and a smiley-face-with-a-tongue-sticking-out emoji. “At least this one isn’t one hundred percent awful.”

“It’s not, but it seems to suggest the sender is not entirely convinced your uncle has passed on,” Chesterfield said.

“Has he?”

“Passed on?”

“Yes.”

“He was dead when he arrived here,” Chesterfield said.

“Do you expect that condition to change?”

“It would be unusual if it did.”

However, although I certainly enjoyed Starter Villain, it feels to me as if Scalzi was a bit off his game when he wrote it. It's funny, but not as funny as I expect Scalzi to be, and it's exciting, but not as exciting as I expect Scalzi to be... You get the picture. In fact, Scalzi writes in an Afterword

There is a lot I could say about the writing of this novel, but the short version of it is that halfway through writing it I caught COVID, and while my physical symptoms were mild, it scrambled my brain pretty seriously for a few months there.

I said there is a fundamentally simple plot. It's the "wise beggar who defeats a king" story. Charlie, when we first meet him, is an out-of-work business journalist who is working as a substitute school teacher to make ends meet. What I want you to notice is that both of those professions train their practitioners to recognize bullshit, and Charlie is good at that. As for Charlie's opponents, they are, in the words of one of Charlie's allies

what people like them usually are: a bunch of dudes born into money who used that money to take advantage of other people to make even more money. It works great until they start believing that being rich makes them smart, and then they get in trouble.

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