Vicious

Vicious is a novel by the American writer V. E. Schwab, published in 2013. It is the first book of her Villains trilogy, and it takes the superhero story and tells it from the side of the people involved rather than the side of the powers.

Victor Vale and Eli Cardale meet at college and discover that they have the same appetite for the exceptional. They begin with academic interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences and reports of extraordinary ability, and reach the conclusion that a person could be made to develop powers if the conditions were exactly right.

The experiment they attempt costs lives and sends Victor to prison. Ten years later he is out, and Eli, now working under the name Eli Ever, has begun killing anybody else who has the abilities they set out to create, on the grounds that they should not exist. Victor, with the help of a young woman whose quiet manner conceals what she can do and a fellow inmate called Mitch, sets out to find the man who was once his friend.