Vicious

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fantasy / Schwab, Victoria	4-week checkout	On Hold Shelf

"Victor and Eli started out as college roommates-- brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong. Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison, determined to catch up to his old friend (now foe), aided by a young girl whose reserved nature obscures a stunning ability. Meanwhile, Eli is on a mission to eradicate every other super-powered person that he can find-- aside from his sidekick, an enigmatic woman with an unbreakable will. Armed with terrible power on both sides, driven by the memory of betrayal and loss, the archnemeses have set a course for revenge-- but who will be left alive at the end?" -- from publisher's web site.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Bad vs. Worse submitted by eharvey on June 16, 2014, 8:48pm This book was similar in many ways to classic good vs. evil stories, but it wasn't so easy to hash out who was good and who was evil in this one. It was a thrilling page-turner from a young author. I am curious to see what she comes up with next. We read it for my book club and it led to some great conversation.

No good guy. submitted by eknapp on August 16, 2017, 6:28am Two brilliant college students figure out how to use near death experiences to make themselves "ExtraOrdinary". Eli heals like Wolverine and Victor controls pain. Eli decides God has ordained him to track down and murder every ExtraOrdinary in the world. Victor hunts Eli--not to stop him from killing but to exact revenge for trying to kill Victor himself.

So one guy is a religious nut serial killer, and the other is a sociopath who gets off on torture. Who exactly is the protagonist here? (I actually kind of like the asymmetry but I can see the lack of a good guy being a problem for a lot of readers. It makes me hesitant to recommend this.)

The bigger problem for me is that Vicious reads like a YA author trying to write a grownup book. And as it turned out, that's exactly what Vicious is. It feels poorly researched and contains leaden, melodramatic exchanges like this one:

"You should be careful, playing with guns. Sooner or later you're going to get shot."
"The novelty wore off when your boyfriend played target practice with my chest."
"Yet here you are. Clearly his message wasn't impactful enough."


Thud.

Still, A+ for concepts.

Dark book, great read submitted by jdev13 on June 15, 2019, 6:07am I really enjoyed this dark and twisty story of two college students whose arrogance leads them to a science experiment and superpowers. The two men are pitted against each other in a battle of good vs. evil that plays out a lot more like a bad vs. bad battle of arrogance. A really strong start to this series!

Fantasy submitted by bookasaurusray on July 27, 2022, 10:47pm I really love a book where there arent any real, reedemable characters.