Charlie is a sacked journalist struggling to get by with a substitute teacher’s salary, and dreams of maybe owning the neighborhood pub one day if he can ever get approval for a loan that uses his father’s house as the collateral. That’s the only good thing going for him, that house: if all else goes wrong, he still has a place to live. Then, walking home from attending his uncle’s funeral (where he had to stop people from trying to stab the body, for some reason), it blew up. Fortunately, his uncle’s former assistant has a solution: follow his cat. Follow his cat?

Charlie’s uncle, it turns out, was a supervillain. Not the kind with a cool uniform and a nemesis, not even a platypus wearing a hat. He and his colleagues (Evil League of Evil, anyone?) are more like dark venture capitalists or tech bros who are leaning into the whole Machiavellian manipulation of society thing. Charlie learns that since the Evil League of Evil is nepotistic, he’s just inherited his uncle’s authority, responsibility, holdings — and rivals. Fortunately, he now has a volcanic island superlair with genetically augmented dolphins and cats. The former are on strike (and hilariously vulgar), but since Charlie is new their leader Dark Flipper might give him a chance to prove himself before doing anything. Unfortunately, Charlie’s uncle’s rivals know he is fresh on the job, and vulnerable: they claim Uncle Jake owed them money, and being villains they’re perfectly willing to kill/dismember/etc Charlie to get what they want. Unfortunately for them, before being a struggling substitute he was a business journalist, and he smells something fishy that’s not the dolphin’s lunch. Enter schemes and machinations all made possible by sentient typing cats.

Starter Villain is a comedy action-thriller that has a lot of fun with supervillain tropes. I was amused to read in Covert that many young Mafia members try to educated themselves on how to be the Mafia by watching films like The Godfather: here, we find a cabal of tech-biz criminals taking clues from James Bond movies, at least to a point. Charlie’s uncle was fiscally responsible and didn’t bothered with a multi-million dollar war room. The greatest appeal for the reader is the humor inherent in Charlie exploring this premise, as he is half-amused and half-horrified at his uncle’s previously hidden life. As he gets deeper in, though, there’s a plot that involves a secret warehouse full of plunder.

I experienced this via audiobook, happily giving my money to Amazon for the pleasure of listening to Wil Wheaton perform for 8+ hours. I was never an Audible member until I tried his take on Redshirts during a free trial, and I was so blown away by his performance there and in Ready Player One that I actively look for new work by him. He lives up to his usual high standards here, helping sell the humor: sometimes when he performed lines, there was so much ‘Wil-on-the-verge-of-laughing’ that I wasn’t sure if it was the character or the narrator so amused by the writing that he couldn’t restrain himself. It was Wheaton that pushed this into the utterly enjoyable category for me. The worldbuilding was good, and other parts of the book perfectly fine. Where it failed for me was satire against tech-bros and the like: frankly, Dave Eggers’ dark and absurd take on these tech heads in The Circle and The Every makes Scalzi’s attempts at mocking them look positively unimaginative by comparison. Still, it’s much better than The Kaiju Preservation Society, which had a shadow of a main character and a plot so simplistic that the book was saved only by the really interesting worldbuilding. Starter Villain is much better by comparison, and Wheaton pushes it into the solidly memorable territory, from the Russian accents to his doing extremely vulgar dolphins.