Vicious

But sometimes you just need time.

And I saw this V.E. Schwab clip from an interview that she did where she said that the book Vicious took her two and a half years to write.

And I was like, wow.

And I read Vicious.

I really enjoyed Vicious.

And so that book has a braided timeline, three different timelines.

And she said one year of that two and a half years was getting the timeline right.

And today we're talking about something readers have waited a very long time for, including myself.

Vicious arrived in 2013, Vengeful arrived in 2018, and now 13 years after we first met Victor Vail and Eli Ever, and eight years after that extraordinary Vengeful ending, VE is back with the third and final installment, Victorious.

Victoria, welcome to Shell Care Society.

Thank you so much.

Like my pitch? Yeah.

Okay.

So Vicious is about two pre-med students, Victor and Eli, who discover that the key to superpowers are near-death experiences and then set out trying to manufacture their own abilities by controlling their own deaths and resurrections.

And everything goes terrible.

She just released a new book, which is called Victorious.

It is closing out her Villains trilogy.

I haven't read this one, but I want to after reading the synopsis.

That sounds

...

the Vicious series, and I had kind of, like, been like, "Oh, well, the third one comes out, so I might just do, like, wait till that comes out, and do a read of that." And then I was so kindly sent the E-arc for Victorious, the third book in that series, because we were having- ...

V.E. Schwab on the podcast.

And guys-

Yeah.

And, and then other books that we've read, what did we, what did we just read? We started Vicious by V.E.

Schwab.

since that series wrapped up recently.

... two super different ones, and you wrote them really, really differently in different, in different timelines, and we will definitely get into that.

But the first question I wanna ask you, Victoria, is how do you know when you start writing a book that it's gonna be a trilogy? And this is, this is a weird question maybe for this one because you wrote, out of the two trilogies, the first books are "Vicious" and then "A Darker Shade of Magic," and you wrote those back to back.

Yeah, so like, I mean, people always think that "Vicious" was originally a standalone.

Right.

But it was never a standalone for me.

... had been aborted three book- or two books into three, and so I, I didn't, and so it just ended on a cliffhanger, and I never wanted to have my readers go through that experience unintentionally again.

Obviously, "Gathering of Shadows" would end on a, a brutal cliffhanger for the "Shades of Magic" trilogy.

But for me, it was really important that "Vicious," "Vengeful," and "Victorious," that they, at least the first two, could stand by themselves.

Schwab, releasing October 6th.

This is the conclusion to her enormously popular villain series, which kicked off with the book Vicious.

The premise of the series is that two incredibly ambitious college roommates, Victor and Eli, discover a scientific method to develop superpowers.

Which is a great hook.