Starter Villain by John Scalzi

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

Now a New York Times bestseller!

Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place.

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 2006 John W. Campbell Award went to John Scalzi. He won the Campbell Award for Outstanding New Writer, and his debut novel, Old Man's War, was a Hugo Award finalist for science fiction. The Ghost Brigades, The Android's Dream, and The Last Colony are among his other works. He has received the Hugo Award, the Romantic Times Critics Choice Award for science fiction, the Seiun, the Kurd Lasswitz, and the Geffen awards, among others. His blog, Whatever, is one of the most popular in current science fiction.

Scalzi was born and reared in California and attended the University of Chicago. He and his wife and daughter live in southern Ohio.