This book was so explosive, and the way Schwab has set up the dual timelines is so brilliant. While the events of the present timeline never feel like they have gasp-worthy plot twists, the suspense set up by the short chapters, fast pace, and constantly shifting timelines is addicting to read. The flashbacks to the past interrupting the currently moving plot creates a constantly changing interpretive framework that feels exciting to uncover.

Somehow, the reveals of this book are gradual, yet the reading experience remains lightning quick. By constantly moving between revelation and forward momentum, you're thrown into processing new information while you're anticipating the next big collision. Each flashback gives just enough information to alter your understanding, then catapults you back into the present before you have time to let anything settle.

These revelations allowed for so much philosophizing and analysis. Interestingly, the suspense comes almost entirely from this volatile character development. Rather than trying to guess what might happen, the tension is carried by the ambiguity of the emotional and moral meaning of the plot itself.

Not only does this suspense create an addictive page-turning experience, it feels loaded like a wound up spring as each revelation compounds upon the last. Each intervening chapter adds a new piece of information that changes the significance of something you already thought you understood.

As every flashback adds new information, every present-day chapter moves the characters closer together. When the two finally converge, the detonation is unrelentingly forceful as all of the context accumulated for 300 pages gets released at once. By the end of the book, it feels like you've been on the wildest rollercoaster of your life, and you immediately want to get back on to feel the rush again.

While the plot is exciting enough on its own, the true stars of Vicious are its morally ambiguous characters, Eli and Victor. It takes a lot of skill to write characters who are deeply flawed and dangerous, and make them legible and likeable, and there's a twisted sense of excitement in wanting to root for a character who you know is bad.

Through Victor and Eli, Schwab creates a sort of critique on the superhero genre itself, playing with its moral shorthand as she questions what makes someone a hero, what makes someone a villain, and if the distinction is even reliable in the first place.

Eli and Victor are frankly "bad" people, and yet they are fascinating because they are so psychologically coherent. Especially as the book progresses, the timelines converge, and their deeper machinations begin to be revealed, there is a certain tragedy in both of their characters that makes them uncomfortably easy to empathize with.

Eli and Victor are so wrapped up in their own trauma, motivations, social perceptions, and ideologies that easy moral categorization is nearly impossible. The fun of this book is uncovering the messiness underneath the outward projections the characters begin with, rather than trying to determine a true hero or villain.

This book is definitely for the superhero comic book lovers as the inspirations are clear. It feels at once like a love letter to the genre and a complication of its most common tropes, and the fast-paced action feels like a perfect fit. It's cinematic without being overwritten, detailed just enough without being drawn out, full of malice and manipulation and delicious ambiguity.

Simply put, it's fun as fuck. A bit of intellectualism packaged in a fast, nasty story that creates a moral mess and refuses to apologize for it.