Starter Villain: You Inherit a Volcano Lair, Spy Cats, and a Union Problem
August 26, 2026
My uncle once left me a table saw. A good one — I still use it. Charlie Fitzer’s uncle left him a volcano.
That’s the setup of Starter Villain, and I’ll be honest, the title almost lost me. Sounded like a one-joke book. But I run a small carpentry outfit back in Regina, and the thing that actually hooked me wasn’t the volcano. It was the paperwork.
Let me back up.
Charlie is a substitute teacher. Broke, divorced, going nowhere in particular. Then his estranged uncle Jake dies and leaves him the family business — and the family business is not what anyone was told it was. I’ll leave the reveal where Scalzi puts it. Let’s just say the actual job comes with a volcano lair straight off a movie poster, and it goes stranger from there.
Stranger including the animals. There are some very smart, very opinionated animals on the payroll, and a couple of them have grievances Charlie is now expected to sort out. That’s as much as I’ll spoil — it’s funnier when you meet them cold.
Here’s where the book got me, and it’s why I’m recommending it instead of just chuckling and moving on. Under all the gadgets, Starter Villain is a book about being handed something big that you never asked to run. About walking into an operation full of people who all knew the old boss, who are all sizing you up to see if you’ve got it, and who have very real problems that are suddenly your problems.
I felt that one in my bones. The first year I had my own crew, I wasn’t lying awake over blueprints. I was lying awake over payroll, and over a guy named Dennis who figured he should’ve had my job. Charlie’s version has better special effects. The knot in the stomach is exactly the same.
Scalzi keeps the whole thing moving. Short chapters, jokes that actually land, and a plot that never sits still long enough to sag. That makes it a great water book. When Cole came sprinting up the sand to inform me that Luke had “definitely, probably” flushed a crab down the villa toilet, I could set the book down, go investigate the crime scene, and drop right back in without losing my place. It survived the crab incident. High praise around here.
A couple of honest notes, because that’s the deal we’ve got.
This one is comedy first. If you want your sci-fi grim and heavy — real body count, someone you love dying in chapter nine, a knot in your chest the whole way — this isn’t that book. You’ll spend the entire time wishing it were something it’s not, and that’s no way to read. Go grab something darker and let Charlie be.
But if you’ve never read John Scalzi and you’ve been meaning to, this is a great front door. You don’t need to have read a single other thing of his. It stands completely on its own — one book, start to finish, no ten-volume commitment hanging over your head. Just a sharp, funny, fast story you can knock out over a long weekend.
So here’s my beach-chair verdict. Read Starter Villain if you want smart comedy with a real heart under the henchmen — the kind of funny that’s actually built well and not just goofy for the sake of it. Skip it if what you’re after is scared or gutted.
Me, I’d take the volcano over another table saw any day. Bigger workshop.