I’ve raved here in the past about Hench and Villain, two books by Natalie Zina Walschots. In Hench, a woman works very boring temp jobs for supervillains (and it turns out that even when you work for supervillains, you still need to deal with bosses who are way too interested in how you are feeling, office politics, and worries about health insurance). In Villain, the sequel that just came out last month, she’s moved into a second-in-command position and is working to destroy the organization that manages the world’s superheroes. Both books explore work, power, loyalty, and what happens when ordinary people find themselves working for extraordinary (and often terrible) bosses. So the crossover felt natural. Here’s our conversation.
Alison: Since first reading Hench in 2020, I have thought that our work overlaps in so many interesting ways: workplace power dynamics, labor exploitation, competence, resentment, burnout, institutional absurdity, the ethics of loyalty, the ways so many workplaces encourage people (subtly or not so subtly) to ignore obvious harm, and the whole emotional texture of modern work. So I am very excited to talk!
Natalie: I personally think it is fascinating, hilarious, and deeply telling that a book about working for supervillains was somehow so relatable to so many people. And certainly a lot of that is intentional — I chose to write about the mundane intersecting with the horrific and fantastic, so all the scrungly parts of reality should feel familiar in those ways. But still, I think if there are all these elements about institutional evil and crushing bureaucracy and predatory mentorship and employee mistreatment is resonating so much, if a story about working for a supervillain is something so many people saw themselves in … we should probably be looking more closely at that and what the actual fuck is wrong with our workplaces that so many people recognize themselves in Hench.
Alison: Yeah. It’s a pretty bleak statement about modern work.
You have such a talent for capturing the mundanity of office work, even against a backdrop of working for supervillains. I knew I was going to love Hench early on when one character was describing a supervillain’s office to another and she mentioned that there are out-of-date computers and an annoying assistant who microwaves fish every day, and one supervillain gets described as the type of boss who pushes too much for a “real answer” when he asks how you are, all while making too much eye contact … and when the main character first meets him, he tells her, “My partner and I have been talking about opening our relationship, and it’s going really well.” I immediately thought, man, we all recognize that boss. I get so many letters about that boss! And then you carry it on in Villain. They have department sprints! They put out an RFP for proposals of evil-doing! To what extent were you drawing on your own real-life work experiences when you wrote Hench?
Natalie: It’s coming from a real place, I can tell you that much lol. Some of the events are more directly inspired than others; I did hide my coworker’s endlessly ringing phone in a pumpkin one time, for example, and the Electric Eel is a composite of several bosses I have had. My process is pretty simple, in that I take an incident or a concept — say, for example, writing and circulating RFPs — that is extremely mundane as an activity in a lot of workplaces or industries. Then I take that thing and plop it into the context of supervillainy and evildoing, and see what happens. Usually the results are hilarious, but sometimes something really interesting happens and in addition to being funny as hell, it works a little too well and that’s when I know I have really hit gold. The things that feel too real, or almost hyperreal, tend to be where the richest narrative veins are. But honestly something being funny as fuck is perfectly valid and often enough for me to find a spot for it in a book somewhere.
Alison: If you write a third book in the series, I really hope you include a terrible office Slack channel.
Natalie: This is, of course, an excellent idea and something I have thought about a lot. Can you imagine the channels? Can you imagine the DMs and groupchats? Nightmarish.
Also, this is a bit of an aside, but you absolutely know there are several competing supervillain Discord servers that have just the most horrific mods in the known universe.
Alison: You know the way some offices have a Slack channel for people to post photos of their pets? I like to imagine that they had one where Leviathan (the supervillain in both books) would often post photos of his lizard.
Natalie: I am wheezing about this, because the moment I read this I could see the entire thing so clearly. So of course there is a pets channel, like every other work and social space on the planet. It is quite lively and varied, and you are as likely to see a praying mantis as a can on a window perch. And then once every few months, Leviathan will post a captionless image of Shannon the Iguana, always immaculately lit, and it receives a zillion reacts but no comments because everyone overthinks their replies into paralysis.
Alison: Yes! Yes, please.
I don’t know if you’re a fan of The Wire, but I loved that element of the mundane mixed in there too — like when Stringer Bell, who’s essentially the managing director of a criminal drug dealing network, decides they’re going to start using Robert’s Rules of Order at their meetings. And actually, in the Sopranos too, I always loved the scenes that made it clear that even in this underground criminal enterprise, they had to deal with routine personnel stuff and business minutia, and it was just as boringly human there as anywhere else.
Natalie: Perhaps extremely unsurprisingly, I love The Wire. Another example of a Stringer Bell-esque character is Charles Foster Offdensen, the manager/handler of the fictional metal band Deathklok in the show Metalocalypse. I have a deep affection for characters with practical jobs in wild fictional universes.
Crime is actually very boring most of the time. I am not kidding. A thing that came up time and time again in the research I was doing was that so much of the day-to-day of organized crime was just sitting around waiting for Something To Happen. Sometimes that was a planned something and sometimes that was not, but there was a hell of a lot of just being available when you needed to be available and killing time waiting for the next brief punctuation of extreme violence.
I think the mundane parts, the boring parts, are a crucial element to all of these stories, both because they take up the majority of the time of the illegitimately employed, and because they are a very important part of humanizing these experiences. We all know what it is like to be bored, to be endlessly waiting for Something to Happen, to have our time yoked to a job and being unable to escape that, especially when that time feels like it is utterly wasted. The feeling of being on the clock is very ordinary and terrible in its own right, and being able to really feel the boredom and tension of that time passing makes things like the life of a henchperson seem so much more real and relatable. We’ve all been there watching the clock as our shift crawls to an interminable end, and the awful truth is it doesn’t feel very different whether you are behind a counter making sandwiches or in a chopshop waiting for some shit to go down.
Alison: At one point in Villain, there’s a character, Tamara, who clearly has PTSD from her old dysfunctional job and who’s carrying that stuff forward to her new job. Her old boss was punitive in very, uh, disturbing ways, and she was braced for that happening at the new job too, and it took her a while to believe the new place wasn’t like that. Which happens all the time in real life! I loved that. No question, just wanted to say it.
Natalie: Thank you for saying it, and I have terrible news: Tamara’s experience with her boss is directly inspired by something that happened to me at work, in real life, that I am frankly still furious about. I was working in an office environment, and a relatively polished/respectable one with extremely recognizable clients, doing social media work. I got the job directly through a friend, who would be my direct supervisor, and I had a lot of hope for the job being a genuinely good and safe and supportive place to work. This is foreshadowing.
One day I arrived at work and it was just me and one other person in the elevator, a man I had seen before but did not work with directly and had never spoken to. We had no relationship at all, professional or otherwise. He was scowling when he got on, and as soon as the doors closed I could tell the vibes were rancid. A few seconds into the ride he screams “Fuck!” out of nowhere and starts punching the wall of the elevator over and over again while screaming at no one. Like he was in a rage room, just letting it all out, while I was trapped in there with him. It was absolutely terrifying.
After one million years the doors opened and he got out, and I rode the last few floss up shaking. I immediately went to my friend/boss and told her what happened, while I was visibly very shaken. She just … shrugged, and said, “Oh that’s just HisName, he gets like that, don’t worry about it.” She was just completely unbothered, like oh yeah that’s just the guy who freaks the fuck out once in a while. She was completely uninterested in talking to his supervisor and discouraged me from doing so because he was not the sort of person who would be let go for something like that and what was the point.
While Tamara’s experience in her own elevator was definitely more intense than mine, it still disturbed me greatly, and also was a moment of deep disappointment in terms of the way it was handled, or not handled.
Alison: That’s unhinged. And then you just had to go back to work like everything was normal, and everyone around you was acting like it’s normal, which in some ways is the most deeply unsettling aspect of experiences like that.
Natalie: That is always the part that has fucked me up the most about experiences like this: I know what happened was outrageous and terrifying, but the responses of the people around me make me question my own reality. It’s profoundly destabilizing.
Alison: Do you consider Anna/the Auditor (the protagonist in both books) a good boss? I’m curious to hear your thoughts, given the setting they’re working in (a supervillain’s lair, basically).
Natalie: I think she is trying very hard to be a good boss. I don’t think that she is especially suited for it, and managing people is neither her strong suit nor something she takes a lot of pleasure in. But she does want to protect the people working for her and give them the best chance that she can to succeed, and that counts for a lot. I think she occupies a position that most supervillains would find themselves in, which is that The Work is all consuming and managing the people who work for her is just a necessary step in service to that work, but one that often takes a much lower priority than other things. She isn’t cruel to her team but she certainly can be neglectful, and when big shit is going down her attention is entirely elsewhere.
She’s definitely not a good boss, but she’s not an awful one either. Being a boss is an unfortunate side effect of where she finds herself, and something she will deprioritize at the expense of her team when necessary.
Alison: At the same time, she cares about her people, she gives them a lot of autonomy to do what they’re good at, and she’s very clear about the realities they’re working with. She’s not trying to hide the reality of it from anyone, which I respect a lot.
Natalie: She is trying very hard to balance keeping her people safe while treating them as smart, capable people entitled to autonomy. She might not be the best at replying to their emails and signing off on PTO though. I think she’d be a much better mentor than a supervisor, if that makes sense.
Alison: Okay, can we talk about the boss/employee relationship between the Auditor and Leviathan? Their dynamic was obviously problematic in so many ways, but do you think the Auditor considered it that, at least in the first half of the book? I feel like, at least for a while, she did that thing that so many people do when becoming indispensable to a very powerful boss, where they’re so pleased with how indispensable and trusted they are that they don’t clearly see how deeply warped the power dynamics of the relationship are. And even once she started to see it more clearly, she never really wanted to look at it head-on. (I think we can discuss this without spoilers.)
Natalie: Oh man, this is a rich and complicated topic. Their boss/employee relationship has evolved a lot over time, so it’s hard to pin down, and the closer they have become and the more indispensable the Auditor has become, the more troubling that relationship is. I think that initially, especially in the first half of Hench, she would not have considered their relationship problematic at all (at least certainly no more so than any position working for a supervillain would be), and that even the weirdest parts were worth the benefits and the freedom that came with the position that she occupied.
I think that has changed pretty radically over time, and she knows it; I don’t want to get into this too deeply, but I will say that I think you’re absolutely right in that it’s something she chooses not to look at too closely. Also many other things are escalating all around her in tandem with their relationship evolving, so it’s very easy for examining their relationship to drop down the priority list while so much else is on fire.
Alison: Well, now that you’ve given us this world, are you thinking about a third in the series? I really want to read about the horrible Discord mods.
Natalie: I am a lot more than thinking about it. When I wrote Hench, I had no idea what its future might be, so I wrote it to be a completely self-contained story while still leaving it open-ended enough that I could return to the world if that opportunity ever came. To my eternal gratitude it did, and so Villain was written from a different place, with a very clear path to continuing the story. It’s still in the early stages, of course, but I am already deeply invested in exploring what happens next in the Leviathan-Auditor-Decoherence hate triangle.
Alison: I am so glad to hear this!
Have you seen the Ask a Manager/Hench mash-up someone made?
Natalie: I HAVE, and it makes me SO HAPPY. I should specify that I have seen but have not read it; I have a hard rule against reading fan fiction of my own work, despite how utterly overjoyed its existence makes me. I grew up writing and reading fan fiction and writing something that inspired fanfic was always a core goal of mine, so any time there is a new entry on AO3 for the Henchiverse, my little trashbag heart swells. But I cannot read it, because I don’t want my own writing to be consciously or unconsciously influenced by it in any way. As much as it breaks my heart, my eyes must merely glance at the titles from afar.
Alison: Well, then please just trust me that it is a beautiful thing and the person who made it is a genius.
Thank you for talking with me! This has been an absolute delight.
Natalie: Thank you so much for talking to me, this was wonderful!
Buy Hench here: Amazon, Bookshop
And its new sequel, Villain: Amazon, Bookshop
* I earn a commission if you use those links.
The post Ask a Hench: an interview with Natalie Zina Walschots, the author of Hench and Villain appeared first on Ask a Manager.
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