Natalie Zina Walschots on good bosses and bad guys [encore]

May 27, 2026

This week we’re bringing you a conversation Michael Tamblyn had in 2021 with Natalie Zina Walschots about her extremely fun novel called Hench. It’s about a world where superheroes are out there saving the day in super ways, while villains, who are a lot like you and me, run organizations bent on taking over the world while also trying to keep scores up on Glassdoor.

Natalie’s just released a sequel to Hench, and it’s called Villain. 

 

[From 2021:]

We learned about some of the fantastical worlds Natalie enjoyed exploring as a young reader "often for sheer escapism," as well as the writers she drew inspiration from while starting out as a writer herself, and as a lifelong student of supervillainy:

• Robert O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and Z for Zachariah
• High fantasy including J. R. R. Tolkien, but also Shannara, Dragonlance, and "anything with a wizard holding an orb on the cover" or "a skeleton holding a sword"
• Christian Bök, Karen Solie, bp Nichol, and other writers "doing super weird things with language and the structural materiality of language..."
• Soon I Will Be Invincible "was the first book I read from the perspective of a supervillain."
• "Paradise Lost is really important to me ... the relationship between Satan the adversary to the world informs the way I write villains."
• Neil Gaiman's Sandman, where "a character who's a villain in one context becomes the protagonist in another."
• Vicious by V E Schwab
• Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus and various writings of Catherynne M. Valente for their "messed up fairy tale feel."