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Join us in-person to meet and listen to authors, illustrators, and performers from across Canada! Check back regularly to see additions to our 2026 lineup!
Natalie Zina Walschots is a writer and game designer. She is the Author of Hench (William Morrow, 2020), a novel about the mistreated and undervalued employees of supervillains. The direct sequel, Villian (William Morrow, May 2026) continues the story of the Auditor as she fights institutionalized superheroism and goes on the exact opposite of a redemption arc. Hench was a finalist on the 2021 season of Canada Reads and was nominated for a Locus Award for Best First Novel. Natalie is the Narrative Director at Double Rex Studios, currently at work on their debut title, Thumbsplitter. Her writing on the interactive adventure The Aluminum Cat won an IndieCade award for Innovation in Experience Design, and her work with Digital Howard as part of the social media team for the television show Wynonna Earp won Best Cross-Platform Project – Fiction at the 2017 Canadian Screen Awards. Natalie’s work also includes LARP scripts, heavy metal music journalism, video game story bibles, and weirder things classified as “interactive experiences.” She is (unfortunately) the author of two books of experimental poetry: Thumbscrews, which won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry; and DOOM: Love Poems for Supervillains. Natalie plays a lot of TTRPGs, participates in a lot of Nordic LARPs, watches a lot of horror movies and reads a lot of speculative fiction. She lives in Nova Scotia with her partner and four morally bankrupt cats.
The Boys meets Assistant to the Villain in the electrifying, sharp, violent, and hilarious sequel to the highly acclaimed novel, Hench. Filled with a queer and neurodiverse cast, Villain asks the question: what happens when a diabolically brilliant henchperson looks back at their already storied career and thinks, I can be so much worse.
The hench once called Anna, now known to her colleagues and enemies as the Auditor, has carved out a wicked name for herself. Any superhero unlucky enough to cross her path knows her potential and powers. Surely, her recent success should taste sweet: she has an incredible job with lots of perks, her boss will literally annihilate anyone who crosses her, and her greatest enemy, the former hero Supercollider, has been utterly defeated—literally ground to a still-living pulp.
But the Auditor still has her sights set on a greater work: destroying The Draft, the organization that makes, trains, and manages the world’s most powerful superheroes. These “heroes” have shown time and time again that they do more harm than good (she has the spreadsheets to prove it), and now is the time to stop the damage at its source.
Yet all is not well for the Auditor and her fellow evildoers. Her employer, Leviathan—the world’s most feared supervillain—is not coping well with Supercollider’s defeat at someone else’s hands. As their relationship deepens, her work-life balance increasingly involves navigating the feelings of someone who doesn’t believe they have any. Moreover, her unlikely ally and unexpected friend, Quantum Entanglement, has reappeared, forcing the Auditor to confront all the ways they deceived each other. Tension and uncertainty haunt the Auditor, and the fear that their triumph is about to crumble looms over all of them.
The Auditor soon finds herself facing down an opponent unlike any she’s taken on before—not another superhero, but someone like her, someone much more dangerous: The Draft’s Chief Marketing Officer. Their conflict isn’t a test of physical prowess, but ideas, and as their fight escalates, she’ll need more than preternatural pattern recognition, data analysis, and a horrific imagination to meet this challenge. It’s guerrilla ad warfare, and the Auditor might have finally met her match.