I blame the professor who made me read Frankenstein, because you can never go back to not-recognizing all the references everywhere. (But I mean — Victor Vale and his origin story is kind of a dead giveaway.) Still, while I appreciated Frankenstein I didn’t like it much, and I adored Vicious. Antiheroes and sinnamon rolls populate the pages, wrapped up in an all-consuming man-vs-man pursuit.

Part of the reason I can’t give this 5 stars is that I read most of it in public — on the bus and in lecture halls — so I couldn’t afford to get invested enough to have visible emotional reactions. And yet it definitely drew quiet gasps and cringes from me, so it’s safe to say VE Schwab has done it again: forged unforgettable, charismatic, morally beyond-questionable characters and mixed them up in an intoxicating plot.