This was the most fun I’ve had reading a book in a long time. Scalzi’s inventive story-telling is original and captivating. I could have sat reading this for days if it wasn’t so short.

I loved the humor, the twists and turns, and that it had a little bit of so many things; humor, science fiction, and mystery.

Have already hand sold this to multiple customers!

If you want a book you can’t put down because you keep laughing, this is the book for you. John Scalzi delivers a witty and devious novel with Starter Villain. An unemployed man living in his deceased fathers home with his two cats inherits the family business from his estranged multimillionaire uncle. The family business? Villainy. What could possibly go wrong?

Starter Villain is packed with action, humor, mystery, espionage, spycraft, and so much more.

Scalzi follows his fun Kaiju novel with another widely entertaining novel. Our protagonist is down on his luck and living in a house he doesn’t own. It seems that his luck has run out and he’s about to be homeless. That’s until he’s asked to stand as the only family member at his late uncles’ funeral. That good deed sends him down a wild path that he could’ve never imagined… becoming a criminal! Scalzi’s writting is witty and fun. Starter Villain comes highly recommended

Happiness is having a new John Scalzi to read and Starter Villain doesn't let one down. Charlie's life is pretty depressing until he is the heir to his Uncle's business. Since that business is being a super Villain, Charlie doesn't seem to be the perfect person to inherit but with the help of cats with keyboards and typing skills and his Uncle's assistant he manages to take it all on with Scalzi's usual humor and excellent writing.

Starter Villain is the perfect book to pick up if you're ever in the mood for a quick, fun read or you need something to get you out of a reading slump. The plot is fast-moving and fun, the characters are entertaining and likable, and cats own real estate. There were some parts which I read and thought to myself "okay, this plan hinges on this super variable and unpredictable factor going exactly right", but if you're a "go with the flow" type reader then that shouldn't bother you at all, and even though personally I am not able to not overthink and just enjoy the ride I still had a really fun time with this story. Charlie, the main character was likeable and a pretty standard "ordinary guy" and it was fun seeing him attempt to take everything in stride as he inherited his uncle's villainous empire. Starter Villain was a pretty entertaining "fish out of water" story and a great read for anyone looking for something they can knock out in a day and feel relatively satisfied.

I was absolutely stunned by how enjoyable The Kaiju Preservation Society was - it's in my top ten books I've read so far this year. So I went into Starter Villain hoping that it would match that energy.

It does. Absolutely.

I wanted another "man down on his luck during COVID is offered an unrealistically unlikely opportunity to change his life, which he takes, and rolls with all of the punches of sci fi shenanigans" book, and that's exactly what I got. This book is unexpected and hilarious, with entertaining characters, a wacky but just this edge of believable storyline, and a satisfying character arc and conclusion. 10/10, no notes.

As a marine biologist who is fully aware of the accurate reputations dolphins have, the cranky, potty-mouthed dolphin labour collective was particularly hilarious to me, and is a great example of why I've loved these types of books. It's just so off-beat and perfectly balances the line between being silly and taking itself seriously.

I will read anything that John Scalzi writes like this. Amazing.

Thanks to NetGalley and Tor for providing me access to this e-book.

This is a fairly difficult book for me to review, because I absolutely hate that I didn’t love it. This was one of my most anticipated 2023 releases…why, you ask? Sentient. computer-savvy. cats. And that cover?! SIGN ME TF UP.

And the cat part of it? Fucking AWESOME. That was by far the selling point of this book for me, and it’s what kept me going when things got rocky. I absolutely ADORED Hera (and Persephone, but we don’t get much of her)!! I couldn’t get enough of Hera, she was purrfect :’) I lived for the scenes where she was typing on her little cat keyboard! I love that she looked out for Charlie. [spoilers removed] Every bit of those 2.5 stars are for Hera alone! If it weren’t for her, I’d have DNFed this book.

I didn’t need another cat. […] But then, no one ever needs a cat these days. That’s not why we have cats. We have cats because they amuse us and because otherwise our clothes would lack the texture only cat hair can provide.
…relatable *coughs*

“When people name cats, they usually do it in one of three categories: food, physical characteristics, or mythology.”
[…] “What about people who name their cats for characters in fantasy books?”
Lmaooo this book be callin’ me out! XD

However, other than the cats…I wasn’t a huge fan, sadly. The premise of the book is fantastic, but the delivery fell flat for me. There’s just something about Scalzi’s writing that grates on my nerves. (I DNFed The Kaiju Preservation Society, oops.) I think maybe I find it a bit…pretentious, I suppose? Also, his particular style of humor seems a bit ridiculous and forced to me at times, to the point of feeling childish. Actually, campy is how I would describe it, which is the same exact issue I had with KPS. Certain aspects toed the line of campy and annoying, hard. One of which being the angry, extremely potty-mouthed dolphins. I couldn’t decide whether or not I thought it was funny, or if it was too much.

In the beginning I thought I would relate a bit more to Charlie because we had an eerily similar situation: his dad divorced his wife, who he’d had 3 kids with, for a younger woman (Charlie’s mom). So Charlie was a good 15 years younger than his 3 half siblings, making him essentially an only child. He felt distanced from the siblings because they were much older, and they were close, leaving him kind of an outsider to their tight knit group. This is disturbingly similar to my situation, down to the fact that his siblings were two men and a woman. (I do have a couple other half siblings, but those 3 were the only ones I ever had any kind of relationship with.) So, it was a little creepy how similar it was…even down to the fact that the siblings got shitty and possessive over assets/money when the dad died (but we won’t get into that heh). But that’s about as far as my connection with Charlie went. He seemed like a good guy, but didn’t have much depth.

In the middle I ended up doing a lot of skimming because I was extremely bored. It’s very dialogue heavy, and when you find the dialogue a bit juvenile that makes things difficult. There was also a lot of waxing and waning about the villain society’s background and technicalities, which I found completely irrelevant in the long run. As short as this book was, I felt like a lot of the lengthy descriptions about how things worked could have been cut out without hindering reading comprehension. I did appreciate the suggestion that uber rich people were villainous, lol.

I guess I was just expecting more out of this book. While the sentient cats do have a fairly large part in this book, I still would have liked to see more of them. (Or maybe just other cat characters besides Hera and Persephone.) I expected more out of the villainy side of things, and found the actual “villains” to be lacking depth. Thankfully this book is very short and easy to get through. Even though this fell a bit flat for me, I think this will be a fun read for a lot of people.

Original review posted on Novel Heartbeat

It's stupid fun. And what's wrong with that, really? I think this will go over well with my meme-obsessed patrons.

Title: Starter Villain
Author: John Scalzi
Genre: Scifi
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

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.

The snark and sarcasm in this made me laugh. And, of course, the cats. Because who doesn’t love super intelligent cats? This was a solid read, if you’re looking for pure entertainment in a not-believable premise. It was entertaining and creative and an easy, quick read. Pure fun, but not a lot of depth. And the dolphins were…underwhelming to me.

John Scalzi isa bestselling author. Starter Villian is his newest novel.

(Galley courtesy of Tor in exchange for an honest review.)

This book is one of my favorite reads of 2023.

It plays on a lot of the "bad guy" tropes, showing that there's even evil among villains. I loved the sentient upper-management cats, the dolphins who were not taking anyone's crap, and the sarcastic banter all around.

Charlie is a great relatable character and I appreciated that he just accepted that there were other people in the room smarter than him. Was he a badass when he needed to be? Yes. But he never tried to be something he wasn't capable of being. We all need a little more of Charlie's honesty.

This book is a drop everything and read this now situation.

Also, where can I get a Hera?

Starter Villain by John Scalzi is a fun comedy that explores the scenario of a nice guy who inherits a criminal empire. The story has a lot of fun with the concept and portrays the criminal empire as a James Bond villain's fantasy. The volcano lair is fun visually for the reader. Scalzi has so much fun writing dialogue for the sentient cats and dolphins. The pacing of the book is rapid speed for a pretty short book at 262 pages. The book is hard to put down. My biggest complaint is the story is too short, I wanted the world a little more fleshed out and wanted more on-the-job training. The comedy works very well and made me laugh out loud numerous times. The story is a little complex with many double and triple crossings, but it is explained well, and I was not lost. There is not a whole lot of action but when there is it is intense and really fun. The intro hooked me right away for this fish-out-of-water story. The ending was perfect for the story. This is my second John Scalzi novel the first was The Kaiju Preservation Society which made it into my top ten books read of the year list, which I see Starter Villain doing this year. I read Starter Villain early thanks to Netgalley and Tor Publishing Group in exchange for a review. Starter Villain was published on September 19, 2023.

Plot Summary: Charlie is down on his luck substitute teacher who dreams of owning a local Chicago bar, but he doesn't have any money. He has just been informed that his Uncle Jack who owns parking lots all over the world has passed away and wants Charlie to perform the services for him as a dying wish. Charlie met Uncle Jack once when he was 5 and he did send him a wedding gift that predicted exactly how long his wedding would last 3 and a half years. Charlie agrees to bury Uncle Jack and is paid a good fee from his estate. When the flowers with obscene cards asking, Jack to rot in hell, and f-off and die. Charlie grows concerned that Jack isn't who he thought he was. The guests all look like hardened criminals who don't even like Jack and just really want to prove that he's dead. Charlie finds out the funeral was a test and is going to inherit his Uncle's real business villainy across the world. Charlie finds out that his uncle has been keeping track of him through his cat who can communicate and has been set up by his uncle for his protection. Charlie must fend off evil organizations hell-bent on killing him and taking over his uncle's business.

What I Liked: The humor throughout the novel is great and never stale. I love Charlie's conversations with his cat Hera after he finds out he can talk. I love the bit about apologizing for the Meow Mix which Hera likes and thinks of as chips, and admits to ordering door dash when he's out. The James Bond Villainy is great and the fact that all the bad guys have cats. The sentient dolphins that strike was a clever and good plot point that led to the conclusion. I liked that I was hooked from the beginning, it is the same setup for The Kaiju Preservation Society but it worked better in this story. I loved how well-rounded the storytelling is. Everything gets resolved in the story. I loved how everybody was let down by how a volcano's death works.

What I Disliked: The novel is too short, I think this is my first ever complaint that a story is too short, but at times it feels rushed. I wanted to see more of Charlie's on-the-job training, and all facets of the empire.

Recommendations: Starter Villain is highly recommended. if you like John Scalzi's writing you will not be disappointed. The Kaiju Preservation Society was nerdier but this one was funnier. It has some great humor that fits in with Douglas Adams meets Monty Python's.

Rating: I rated Starter Villain by John Scalzi 5 out of 5 stars.

I had very much enjoyed Scalzi’s novel The Kaiju Preservation Society, which I read with our Library’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Discussion Group, so was excited to check out his latest work Starter Villain. There are a lot of similarities between the two with both starting out with a well meaning young adult who has failed to achieve the level of success they had hoped for and who gets swept up in a worldwide conspiracy in this case it is a league of super villains rather than monster preservationists. Both novels play with the typical clichés of the genre like a volcano lair, in the case of Starter Villain, and champion the proletariat over the larger conglomerates that have been increasingly common in our world.

The ending felt a bit predictable, but if you enjoy referential geek humor and clever twists on genre conventions than this will charm you. Amongst the fun are also some interesting questions about what in today’s society truly makes a villain and how much of our lives are shaped by outside forces. Plus as the cover hints at there are genetically modified sentient cats as well as dolphins who are both hilarious.

Such a fun and entertaining premise. Imagine if Dr. Evil’s long-lost nephew inherits his Volcano lair but with managerial and super smart cats instead of sharks with freakin’ laser beams on their heads!
John Scalzi is quickly becoming one of my auto-read authors! His writing is so quirky and clever. And the audiobook performed by Wil Wheaton is a pure delight. Many thanks to the author, Tor Books, and Netgalley for this egalley.

Starter Villain is just fun, from beginning to end.

Charlie is down on his luck. He’s divorced, living in a house his half-siblings want to sell, and working as a substitute teacher. All he wants to do is buy the pub downtown, but he has no money and can’t get a loan. Then his estranged uncle dies and leaves him his business – parking garages/villainous empire. Suddenly he’s the owner of a top-secret lair (under a volcano, naturally), though the “sinister mission control room” is somewhat lacking. And now some people are pressuring him to join the Lombardy Convocation, a group of supervillainous villains who just happen to be having their annual meeting.

This story is laugh-out-loud funny. Charlie is in over his head but has some good guidance, including from his cat, Hera (who I adore by the way). Turns out villany is much more corporate than one would have thought. In addition to explosions, Bond-style bad guys, and assassination attempts, he has to deal with worker’s rights, animal liberation, unions, nepotism, and all the other trappings of big business.

It’s an easy, escapist read. The dialogue is witty and full of humor. The characters are a blast, and some are not as one-dimensional as they may seem. And the ending is perfect.

In seventh grade, Shannon—one of the popular girls—told a story about buying a fish at Petco with a friend and immediately dumping it onto the pavement. She and her friend felt bad for the fish after doing this, so they filled cups of water and splashed the fish occasionally to extend its miserable final moments (rather than, y’know, putting it in a bowl). I recalled this story from my childhood as I read John Scalzi’s Starter Villain. I promise it will make sense soon.

Charlie Fitzer is down on his luck. Laid off from his job, he lives in his late father’s old house. His siblings ravenously seek the payout that would come with selling said house, but Charlie resists, even as he tries to use the abode as collateral for a business loan. He substitute teaches in Barrington, Illinois, and generally wallows in directionlessness. Then his estranged uncle Jake dies, and Charlie inherits his parking garage business. That business is a front for Uncle Jake’s real job: villain. Thrust into a world he doesn’t understand—replete with volcano lairs, talking cats, and genetically engineered dolphin spies—Charlie is forced to reckon with his uncle’s legacy and confront billionaires set on killing him and/or thwarting his newly-owned businesses.

A brief peek at Goodreads reviews of Starter Villain will quickly reveal the repeated use of a single phrase: “fish out of water.” Here’s the problem with taking a fish out of water: the fish will die. Such is the case with Charlie in his new, villain-populated world. He desperately needs a Shannon to splash water on him. In Starter Villain, Charlie’s “Shannon” is Matilda Morrison, his late uncle’s right-hand woman. Matilda rescues Charlie from early assassination attempts and constantly splashes water on him in the form of lore dumps.

The fish out of water story doesn’t fit the style John Scalzi is attempting to write. Charlie’s complete lack of awareness makes the book feel like a story happening around him. He—the fish—is flopping around aimlessly while more powerful people splash him with narrative water. In the few moments where he has any sort of agency, he shines, but the novel’s ending (full of splashes of explanative lore) undoes most of the progress Charlie makes in the week or so during which the story takes place.

The concept is solid, but the delivery feels off. A lot of the jokes are overly explained by the characters that tell them, and the prose and dialogue feel clunky. Sometimes Scalzi uses ten words where three will do, and it’s easy to stumble on the awkward sentences. I read a galley copy, so I’m hopeful some of these transgressions will be tightened up in the final publication.

When I finished Starter Villain, I wished it had been Matilda’s story. I’m far more interested in a first mate taking over operations and finding her own place in a villainous world than Charlie’s layman perspective on everything. The story—full of twists I won’t spoil—could’ve remained gloriously intact with a more captivating point of view.

My structural problems with the story knocked some points off my final score, but I enjoyed a few things enough to finish the book. First, Scalzi’s interpretation of a villain slots neatly into the current cultural zeitgeist. In Starter Villain, the actual villainy at play is greed. The story reads as a takedown of capitalism. There are a few delightful scenes in which Scalzi uses hopeful finance startup bros as punching bags for the billionaire villains. Charlie’s experience reporting on the business world plays nicely into this aspect of the story. It leads to a few of the aforementioned moments of growth and achievement for our otherwise water-less fish. Plus, there are sentient cats.

Scalzi’s Starter Villain, despite its issues, doesn’t overstay its welcome. The book is fewer than 300 pages long, and it has all the trappings of a quick and fun-ish story. I wish the story didn’t require regular doses of splashed water to keep our protagonist fish alive, but others may enjoy Charlie’s bumbling journey through his cutthroat world.

This book started great. I read the first 40% in one sitting. The sense of mystery was really intriguing as set up.

But once we get to the main plot...I just found the joke to be played out. This book ends up being a big nothing burger. There are some bits I liked the whole way through - like the dolphins, which are a delight. But I absolutely, completely, hated the last 15-20% and it retroactively made me dislike a lot of the rest of it too. Not a great first try for Scalzi.

Starter Villain by John Scalzi offers a quick and amusing read, making it a decent choice if you're seeking a light-hearted diversion. As a first-time reader of Scalzi's work, I found myself drawn to this book after Anne Bogel's review from Modern Mrs. Darcy's Fall Book Preview. Bogel's assessment captured the essence of the story, and I went in with appropriate expectations.

While Starter Villain provides an enjoyable experience with its humor and wit, it's fair to say that it doesn't delve into groundbreaking territory in terms of substance. The brevity of the narrative leaves little room for deep exploration or intricate character development. Instead, it serves as a snack-sized entertainment, perfect for those moments when you're looking for a light and humorous diversion. The spy cats were very entertaining.

In the end, Starter Villain is a fun read that achieves what it sets out to do—deliver a dose of amusement without aspiring to be a literary masterpiece. If you're in the mood for a quick and quirky tale, it's worth a read, but don't expect it to redefine your reading experience.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me an Advanced Reader Copy of this book.

This book was fun and incredibly unique. Somehow it was silly while also drawing attention to real-life issues like workers' rights (via marine creatures...). Similar vibes to his most recent book, The Kaiju Preservation Society, as opposed to the others of his that I've read that take place predominantly in space and/or the distant future.

How could I resist this cover? I love weird so I dug in! I actually loved the gear up to the weird more though. If this was just a normal story about a guy down on his luck I’d be good with it. The swearing dolphins were funny but a bit much. That said it was pretty entertaining and I’m glad I tried a scalzi!

John Scalzi is easily one of my favorite scifi authors. His books are always witty, quirky, and absolutely hilarious. When I saw the cover for this book with the cat in a suit, I just knew I needed to read it. I was so happy when NetGalley approved me for the ARC because I knew I wanted “hyper-intelligent talking spy cats” in my life.

Just imagine, you are just trying to buy a bar with no money, your half siblings are trying to kick you out of your deceased father’s house, and on top of all of it, your absentee uncle just died too. You think your luck might be turning when you find out that your uncle left you his assets of a multimillion dollar company but of course, there is a cost because your uncle was actually a villain and now you have to defend yourself and the business against a group of other villains. Oh and your cat is actually intelligent, can communicate with you, and has her own house.

One of my favorite scenes:
“What the actual hell are you doing?” I yelled. I decided that the man might gut me like a fish, but until then, there was no upside to backing away now. “I was about to stab your uncle…I may still.” “Why the fuck would you do that?” “Because your uncle has faked his death before and I was told to confirm it had taken this time around.”

I had such a great time reading this book. I was laughing out loud most of the time and the sassiness of the animal companions made me smile the entire time. I highly recommend this book. If you have read scifi books before and think scifi might not be for you, please try this book and other Scalzi books. You won’t be disappointed.