Books like Natalie Zina Walschots

Cara works for a corporation that profits from travel between parallel worlds—and values her precisely because so many alternate versions of her are already dead. Like Anna, she understands that apparent expendability can become leverage once you learn how the system counts people.

Johnson’s acclaimed debut combines a fiercely intelligent, self-inventing heroine with corporate euphemism, class violence, queer desire, and the cold arithmetic of human worth. Its multiverse premise is not decorative: it lets Johnson ask how identity changes when institutions reduce lives to data. The result has Hench’s rare combination of bruised intimacy and ruthless strategic thinking, with every clever reversal carrying an emotional cost.

Incarcerated people fight televised death matches for the possibility of freedom while corporations, commentators, and audiences turn their suffering into entertainment. The book’s kinship with Hench lies in its merciless examination of how sanctioned violence is rebranded as heroism, necessity, or consumer choice.

Adjei-Brenyah shifts between combatants, executives, protesters, and spectators, using satirical corporate language and devastating footnotes to expose the machinery behind the spectacle. Yet the novel never turns its central women into symbols: their love, fear, calculation, and anger remain intensely personal. A National Book Award finalist, it is exhilarating, formally audacious, and genuinely upsetting—the kind of novel whose indictment follows you back into the real world.

Victor Vale does not accept that extraordinary abilities make someone heroic. He has evidence, grievances, and a long-prepared plan—and Schwab lets his revenge story unfold like a piece of precision engineering.

What will feel familiar is not simply the presence of superpowers, but the novel’s distrust of moral branding. Pain becomes identity; charisma disguises cruelty; “hero” and “villain” prove to be labels claimed by people who need witnesses. Schwab’s fractured chronology steadily tightens the screws, making each revelation alter the moral balance. Now a cult favorite and one of her defining novels, Vicious is sleek, obsessive, and dangerously pleasurable: a superhero story for readers who instinctively ask who gets to write the official incident report.