Hannah Nicole Maehrer: Grumpy Villains and Sunshine Assistants
My Villain obsession began young. I recall watching the cartoon villains on my television screen with an awed expression that both entertained and mildly frightened my mother. Even more so when I turned to her at that young age and asked, “Do you think they’d like me?” As a viewer I always believed I could reason with them, I could show them kindness and it would be fixed! Unfortunately, that thought doesn’t pertain to real life but the idea of a big cynical grump being confronted with a human ball of optimistic joy made me giddy even then.
The pipeline from there to the story I’ve written now is startlingly clear. Assistant to the Villain and its coming sequel – Apprentice to the Villain – were simple continuations of my childhood machinations to poke at something or rather someone that should be scary. I think levity makes anything more palatable, for the reader or even for the writer. When I sat down to write about Evie and her boss “The Villain”, it was all of my favorite things coming together to form my favorite story. Where The Villain is cynical, Evie is cheery, where he is violent, she is gentle, and because of it their dynamic lends to the most hilarious situations.
I knew the story was special from the jump, but it wasn’t until I wrote their first meeting that everything felt like it had slid into place. The Villain was shocked by Evie’s candor, by her honesty, but mostly by her smile and even though I was writing the story, I giggled like I was observing. The rest of Assistant to the Villain continued much in the same manner. Late nights at the computer where I was smiling so wide I felt like my cheeks would split, a whole world at my fingertips, but the thing I always return to is my characters and the way they fit like a puzzle piece. They’re opposites, so for all intents and purposes they should oppose one another the way that fire opposes water. But instead of what should be tumultuous conflict, Evie and The Villain complement each other within their differences. Where The Villain is weak, Evie is strong and vice versa. One simply cannot exist in the way they are meant to without the other. My goal with this story was to explore what it really means to be a villain, how perspectives can shift and how people that seem very different aren’t all that different after all.
It was perhaps the most pleasant of surprises that as I wrote both – Assistant to the Villain and its sequel Apprentice to the Villain – I could see my characters being altered by one another. Two people who were so staunchly set in their ways and in their views of the world were suddenly bending more and more every time they were with the other. I had the joy of watching them grow together in each story and I can’t wait to see how they continue in the next installment.
It can be called many things: opposites attract, grumpy vs sunshine. Whatever you consider the dynamic to be, it remains in my stories the fruition of a little girl years ago wondering to herself what would happen if she took the villain’s hand.
Apprentice to the Villain is published by Penguin on 8 August 2024
