A young man lies sedated on a psychiatrist’s couch in Merit, and his doctor talks him gently down into sleep. Then something begins to rise out of the patient’s chest, scaled and patterned, and the office fills with a darkness that has no business being there. When Dr Gabriel Gray shakes the young man awake, the snakes have never existed. All that remains are two small pink dents on the doctor’s forearm. He tells his patient it was only a bad dream. It is the first lie of many, and Victorious by V E Schwab is at its strongest whenever it stays in that room with him.
The Therapist Is the Monster
Gabriel is a new kind of threat for this trilogy, and a frightening one because nothing about him is loud. He runs at six every morning, takes cold showers, rolls his sleeves three neat turns before work and writes only in pencil, on the principle that people can always be revised. Readers of the first two books know what happens to men in Merit who survive their own deaths. What happens to Gabriel is a gift that mirrors Sydney Clarke’s, with one appalling difference, and the novel’s early chapters about his family are the most disturbing horror Schwab has written for adults.
He does not stay in his consulting room. Before long he is inside EON, the agency that hunts ExtraOrdinaries, offering the language of treatment to an institution built on cages. Under his direction the cells become green rooms with unlocked doors, and the residents stay because they have been told to. The prisoners he gathers return from their second brush with death subtly broken, each in a way that suits them: a young woman who reads people’s deaths in mirrors finds that the reflections no longer match the faces in front of her. The book’s best trick is that he believes every word. Forgiveness, in his hands, works as a leash, and one late scene that recasts a childhood punishment as a form of therapy is hard to read and harder to forget.
The novel’s epigraph comes from Erich Fromm, the psychoanalyst, on how a shared illusion can harden into reality. Victorious by V E Schwab treats that idea as a weapon. Gabriel’s victims are not tortured into obedience; they are talked into it, or brought back unable to refuse.
The agents caught in the middle give the book its tragic register. Lilian Rios, a former Marine who can pass through solid walls, believes her loyalty belongs to the agency rather than to whoever runs it, and Victorious by V E Schwab makes that belief the saddest thing about her. Her storyline leads to a hotel-room confrontation with June that is the tensest action sequence of the first half, complete with a six-storey fall and an escape so absurd it turns into dark comedy.
A Family Assembled From Fugitives
Set against all that clinical menace is a household. Three years after the gala that ended the previous book, Mitch Turner has been raising Sydney in a little red cabin on the edge of a small town, splitting wood, eating peach pie at the town diner once a week and checking a gardening forum for coded word from Victor. Sydney is twenty, still looks about fourteen and is quietly teaching herself chemistry by watching university lectures on borrowed logins. Victor left, promised to come back, and has not. She can still feel the thread that ties her to him, and she is furious about it.
The quietest chapter in the book is also its best: the two of them sitting in the back of a pickup in a frozen field, trading futures. He wants the cabin, the truck and a diner with good pie. She wants college, and a dorm that allows dogs. Nothing happens, and everything important about the trilogy is in it.
June, the shapeshifter, gets the other great thread. She can wear anyone she has touched, but she only feels anything in her own body, which is also the only one that can be hurt. Schwab turns that rule into a portrait of loneliness, and June’s private reckoning late in the novel lands with real force.
The novel moves between these people in short, close chapters, and much of its pleasure is tonal. Schwab can cut from a murder to a joke about chocolate milk without a wobble, and the dry exchanges between the fugitives keep a long, grim book breathable. Even its cruellest characters are allowed to be funny.
Where Victorious by V E Schwab Loses Time
The patience that makes the Gabriel chapters so unnerving also slows the first half. His takeover of the agency proceeds by a method that is chilling the first time and procedural by the fifth: a cup of coffee, a death, a return, a headache. The rules of his power are explained, then re-explained from a second point of view. Meanwhile the present-day thread spends long stretches packing a truck and leaving town. For a novel this long, Victorious by V E Schwab is oddly reluctant to let its two halves touch until well past the midpoint.
Victor, the man the trilogy is named for, is largely offstage for that first half. His few chapters are strong, but readers who came for him will be checking how many pages remain before he returns.
And when everything finally converges, the climax splits across so many rooms and perspectives that some long-built confrontations resolve abruptly. One figure in particular, given hundreds of pages of careful construction, is dispatched almost in passing. The emotional payoff survives the crowding. The tension, at moments, does not.
Content warnings matter here. The novel carries grief, bodily horror, coercion, suicidal despair and relentless gunfire, and has no romance at all.
V E Schwab Ends What Vicious Began
This is a closing volume, not an entry point. The first page assumes familiarity with Vicious, the Lockland story of two brilliant students who decided to die on purpose, and with Vengeful, which brought June and the agency into the frame. In her acknowledgments Schwab calls the trilogy thirteen years in the making and says she always knew how it would end. That confidence shows. The ending is decisive, the loose threads are cut rather than left dangling, and the old rivalry at the centre of it all is honoured on its own terms.
It is also a book shaped by private loss. The dedication is to the author’s father, described as ExtraOrdinary in every sense, and a quiet tenderness runs underneath the carnage.
Final Thoughts
Victorious by V E Schwab is uneven in its first half and crowded in its last, and between those two weaknesses it builds the most frightening villain the trilogy has produced and the most affecting family. Readers who finish it will want the rest of the author’s late gothic turn, and her Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil offers hunger and immortality in the same unsentimental key. Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth is the natural next step for anyone drawn to raising the dead with a sense of humour intact. But nothing else quite captures what Victorious by V E Schwab gets right: that the people who survive monsters deserve an ending too.
The snakes on that couch were never real. Almost everything after them is.