Starter Villain

Now a New York Times bestseller!
Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place.
Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan.
Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie.
But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits. Jake had enemies, and now they're coming after Charlie. His uncle might have been a stand-up, old-fashioned kind of villain, but these are the real thing: rich, soulless predators backed by multinational corporations and venture capital.
It's up to Charlie to win the war his uncle started against a league of supervillains. But with unionized dolphins, hyper-intelligent talking spy cats, and a terrifying henchperson at his side, going bad is starting to look pretty good.
In a dog-eat-dog world...be a cat.
OTHER TOR BOOKS BY JOHN SCALZI
Agent to the Stars
The Android’s Dream
Fuzzy Nation
Redshirts
Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded:
A Decade of Whatever, 1998–2008
The Kaiju Preservation Society
When the Moon Hits Your Eye
Monsters of Ohio
THE OLD MAN’S WAR NOVELS
Old Man’s War
The Ghost Brigades
The Last Colony
Zoë’s Tale
The Human Division
The End of All Things
The Shattering Peace
THE LOCK IN SERIES
Lock In
Head On
Unlocked
THE INTERDEPENDENCY SEQUENCE
The Collapsing Empire
The Consuming Fire
The Last Emperox
EDITED BY JOHN SCALZI
Metatropolis
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Community Reviews
What Bookclubbers are saying about this book
✨ Summarized by Bookclubs AI
Readers say the book is a wildly fun, fast-paced, and humorous adventure with lovable characters like sentient cats, dolphins, and quirky villains. Ma...
This was an enjoyable book. A spoof on villain stories. Really enjoyable. My only complaint was I wish there was more cat action.
If there is only one book you read, it needs to be this one. I laughed and I gasped and I laughed some more.
4.25 stars - I adored this book, even more than I thought I would, and highly recommend it for those in search of a short, fun read.
Witty, light-hearted and sarcastic. I never would have read this on my own but so glad I did.
This is The Book, The Book. It's all you expect from a fiction book and then absolutely nothing else. The writing is mediocre, humor is cringe, plot predictable, characters mere tropes. Plot so slow you wonder what the point is.
All characters have exactly the same speaking style. Old men, young men, lackeys, women. All characters speak exactly the same way. Person says something weird, second person makes a silly joke about it, first person stops for a bit then answers. Every single person makes tiny jokes about every sentence and it's not clever puns. Mere dull observations meaning every event is made twice as long. Even engaging stuff like assassination attempts become pointless as they keep joking about it. The author doesn't understand basic humor.
Of course nothing here is real. Even the bad guys are not truly bad. Even assassination attempts or monetary suffering is rapidly removed by gags and easy solutions from the outside. The lead never does anything for himself he's a lame observer.
It's painfully mediocre in every way. Making it actually ... bad. It's not a terrible book yet it feels like reading a teen try his hand at writing fiction. You can imitate most books yet not add anything new or make it feel real or personal. This is what you get if you merely read a random book. It's not bad as such ... just doesn't have a reason to exist.
All characters have exactly the same speaking style. Old men, young men, lackeys, women. All characters speak exactly the same way. Person says something weird, second person makes a silly joke about it, first person stops for a bit then answers. Every single person makes tiny jokes about every sentence and it's not clever puns. Mere dull observations meaning every event is made twice as long. Even engaging stuff like assassination attempts become pointless as they keep joking about it. The author doesn't understand basic humor.
Of course nothing here is real. Even the bad guys are not truly bad. Even assassination attempts or monetary suffering is rapidly removed by gags and easy solutions from the outside. The lead never does anything for himself he's a lame observer.
It's painfully mediocre in every way. Making it actually ... bad. It's not a terrible book yet it feels like reading a teen try his hand at writing fiction. You can imitate most books yet not add anything new or make it feel real or personal. This is what you get if you merely read a random book. It's not bad as such ... just doesn't have a reason to exist.
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