Vicious
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
V. E. Schwab's New York Times bestseller Vicious is a masterful tale of ambition, jealousy, desire, and superpowers.
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?
In Vicious, V. E. Schwab brings to life a gritty comic-book-style world in vivid prose: a world where gaining superpowers doesn't automatically lead to heroism, and a time when allegiances are called into question.
"A dynamic and original twist on what it means to be a hero and a villain. A killer from page one…highly recommended!" —Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Marvel Universe vs The Avengers and Patient Zero
One of Publishers Weekly's Best Fantasy Books of 2013
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
V. E. Schwab’s chilling supernatural thriller unfolds like a hyper-violent revenge fantasy. Victor and Eli were the sharpest (and most obnoxious) students at their university, with a passion for science that led them from hypotheticals to dangerous, illegal experiments that left them both with extraordinary abilities. Ten years on, Victor—who can both give and take excruciating pain—is out of prison and seeking vengeance on Eli, who is now unkillable thanks to his regenerative skin. We love how Schwab shifts back and forth from the good old college days to a grim near-future world, creating a fast-paced puzzle filled with ethical dilemmas and some truly visceral violence. Vicious is a gripping and binge-worthy read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Victor Vale and Eliot Cardale, both brilliant and driven, were friends and college roommates who figured out how to give themselves superpowers. Victor went to jail and Eli began working with the cops. But "villain" Victor is innocent of the charges against him, while "hero" Eli has been killing people whose powers he considers more "unnatural" than his own. When he targets Sydney, a 12-year-old girl who can raise the dead, he gets more trouble than he bargained for. Schwab's characters feel vital and real, never reduced to simple archetypes; for example, Victor isn't a particularly nice man, but he has enough conscience left to know that Eli needs to stopped. In a genre that tends toward the flippant or pretentious, this is a rare superhero novel as epic and gripping as any classic comic. Schwab's tale of betrayal, self-hatred, and survival will resonate with superhero fans as well as readers who have never heard of Charles Xavier or Victor von Doom.
