A Supervillainous Simp

John Julius Reel on Sam Kahn's Henchman

Dear Republic,

I believe it was Aristotle who said, “no literary magazine is truly a literary magazine without a dose of self-promotion,” and, accordingly, we have a review of the editor’s serialized novel as an initial offering in The Depot review series. Needless to say, I haven’t edited the review at all from John’s draft.

-The Editor

A SUPERVILLAINOUS SIMP

In Sam Kahn’s essay, “My Incredible Writing Discipline,” written in part to introduce the serial publication of his novel Henchman on Substack, he describes his book as “a comic novel, on the extraterritorial and interplanetary adventures of Banx Mulvaney as he follows the long winding road to supervillainy.” I do not like that description. I would not normally download such a novel to my e-book reader—even free—but I took a chance on Henchman because Kahn impresses me as the type of person literature needs if it’s going to recuperate vitality and remain robust.

I first discovered Kahn when he left the literary journal The Metropolitan Review a few weeks after its launch last January, to launch a journal of his own, this one. If keeping up with the literary world can be compared to keeping up with a city, then The Republic of Letters is to The Metropolitan Review what, back in seventies, eighties, and nineties New York—when and where I grew up—the spunky and stolid Daily News was to the staid but sometimes stuffy New York Times.

Kahn, like his counterpart at TMR, Ross Barkan, is tirelessly driven to make a mark in the dwindling world of literature—both by championing his own work and the work of others, not necessarily in that order. Check out this wild claim from Kahn, from his essay on discipline: “In the last year, I’ve written five full novels. That’s in addition to having two jobs, a family, to writing regularly on … Substack, to freelancing, to starting The Republic of Letters, which puts out articles on a daily basis.”

Five full novels in a year?

He adds, “I really believe that there is a corner Substack has to turn, about writers putting their ‘A’ work out on the platform. ... I’m making a very deliberate move about posting [Henchman] here, without bothering to ‘send it out’”—to agents and acquisitions editors, he means.

So, he’s not saying he wrote five good novels.¹ He’s saying he’s self-publishing his best one.²

In regard to his superhuman production, Kahn writes that “anger is the most reliable source of energy.” That’s what tipped the scales and made me commit to reading Kahn’s ‘A’ work. I suspect that his anger—like mine—stems, at least in part, from the state of legacy publishing: committee-run, set in its ways, and too beleaguered by the new order to give literature its due. I wanted to see what Kahn’s anger had engendered.

What if reality resembled the world of Hollywood action films, of handsome and invincible heroes—James Bond, Flash Gordon, Indiana Jones, and John Wick—guys who “bullets curve around,” who mow down, outsmart, and trip up armies of trained killers, who suddenly, in these heroes’ presence, fall to pieces and run pell-mell toward sure death—if not first getting cavalierly and publicly executed by their evil bosses for unfortunate oversights?

And what if one of these “expendable” henchmen hired to protect supervillains became the principal protagonist? What if he were a bit of a “simp”: self-conscious about his jug ears, sentimental in love, and a stubborn idealist at work, not really cut out to be a “baddie”? What if this whole fantastical set-up were spun into a kind of workplace comedy, with everyone—especially the protagonist—oddly self-aware and with a nagging existential streak?

Kahn pins down his fictional world with an airtight, sui generis logic, reinforced by arch enemies in Nehru jackets; bored femme fatales in gold lamé; B-movie battle scenes; videogame-like violence; diabolical but ultimately foiled plans to destroy the world; quippy, purposely overblown dialogue; and grandiose, character-defining monologues. Kahn is deft and fluent in creating his mythos, and the reader is effortlessly carried along from one scene of mayhem or death-defying adventure to another.

The one-liners, the turns of phrase, and the action keep the reader entertained, but the protagonist, Banx Mulvaney, is Kahn’s great accomplishment. A leader of various lethal fighting forces, a special ops pro with over four hundred kills, Banx nonetheless has a sensitive streak, gets easily swept up in nostalgia for lost colleagues, and wonders if he has what it takes for the “international criminal syndicate,” or even the off-the-cuff wit for it: “Something about the villain business that I can never quite get used to, and was never spelled out for me in the beginning, is this constant need for snappy repartee.”

His mind is on other things. In his down time—like when travelling to planet Mongo, or set adrift in shark-infested waters after a harrowing, last-minute escape—he dreams of a quiet life in Montclair, New Jersey, listening to Patsy Cline, living happily ever after with his love interest, Lana Lynx, “a gangster’s moll of unusual beauty and bright red hair.” Yet, deep down, he knows he doesn’t have the menacing allure to seduce her away from her life as a kept woman of fiendish despots who dream of world annihilation. His “wanting to know what it all means” is “just not very attractive” to her. Lana prefers People Magazine.

Besides Banx, the characters in Henchman are right out of central casting—which is the point, I think. In Chapter V, when Bond and his forces get past Banx’s security and compromise the control room, and Banx is ordered to tie Lana to a rock jetty so that the rising tide drowns her—and he does it because she’s betrayed him in the past, and because, well, “[r]obotic obedience is the coin of the realm in the henchman business”—and then the base is about to blow, and Banx must escape while knowing that he and his great love have done each other wrong, that’s when Kahn’s writing hits on all cylinders for the longest and most intense stretch. He doesn’t let up on the irony, yet his protagonist’s humanity jumps off the page:

It doesn’t matter … how many guys I kill with my bare hands, with—in some schools of thought—their powers transferred to me. There will just be something essential about me, something as core and inalterable as the shape of my ears, that will forever disqualify me from Lana and from everybody like Lana. And if that is the case then it probably is better, all around, for me to just leave Lana on the rocks waiting for the tide. There will be the guilt and remorse—that is inescapable, and is a real consideration—but, on the whole, a clean break is better: nothing I ever do will overcome the problem of the jug ears and I really can’t spend my life just running uphill and never getting anywhere.

Kahn’s action-movie mythos is American through and through, and so is the breezy, mannered dialogue of the workplace comedy set-up. But, first and foremost, Henchman is character-driven. Banx, not the twists and turns of the plot, kept me interested. So I question Kahn’s having published Henchman in instalments, as if the cliff-hangers—and not Banx’s company—were what carried readers along. And his logline for the book just doesn’t measure up. More accurate and appealing would be, “a comic novel in which wannabe supervillain Banx Mulvaney learns the brutal and sometimes sad compromises he must make to achieve his dream, and if those concessions are worth the cost.”

Generally speaking, literary authors, married to our own work, aren’t capable of summing it up in a succinct and sellable way. If we’ve written well, we’re not really aware what we’ve produced. In the final stages, a committee of dedicated and sharp readers can help give the final product the professional polish that readers deserve. As far as that “corner” that Kahn believes “Substack has to turn, about writers putting their ‘A’ work out on the platform and that work being treated seriously as something beyond ‘blogging.’ … and, in the process, creating “a completely different paradigm for publishing,” if that is to occur, then ‘A’ work has to be put into the packaging, presentation, and promotion, too.

I thought Henchman might have ended sooner. Banx’s supervillain comrades come for him at one point and explain how it’s better to be killed by friends than by strangers. I wonder if Kahn considered bringing his novel to a heartbreaking close there, rather than more neatly—as he winds up doing—thirty pages later. Too neatly? No. He kept me guessing and thinking until the end, although some scenes—those at the Grand Cayman School for Higher Villainy, for instance—lagged for me.

Ultimately, Kahn’s anger has produced a quirky novel with giddy flourishes and singular surface charm, not without some deep and dark turns. I suspect you’ll laugh more than you’ll wince. I’d say Kahn invites more than challenges us to think.

Who says the result of one man’s accumulated anger won’t end up brightening your day?

In his essay on discipline, Kahn writes:

I must have gone about thirteen years at one point ... without a single original story occurring to me ... but imagination is, actually, trainable. ... You just kind of let your brain go quiet. Usually something or other will happen in life, and then, if you’re paying attention, the idea emerges pretty organically out of that ... and then your job, which is harder than it sounds, is ... to build your discipline, which is really a kind of temple for the percolating ideas; and then to just try to write the idea down exactly as it occurred to you, keeping to the strict melody of it and trying to hit line drives only … [not] home runs.

In other words, the hard part is carrying our ideas through—suiting up day after day, ready to provide versatility, freshness, and depth as the story tells itself.

In Henchman, Kahn hits lots of line drives and even a few homers. And he fields everything hit to him. A ballgame has a sui generis logic too—lulls, men left on base, dead-end rallies balancing the clutch hits and runs batted in. You go home happy for time well spent, as pleased to recall the game-changing moments as the moments in between.

Kahn’s a player who stirs things up. He says he’s going to make Henchman available in paperback. I hope so. I hope he gives the packaging and presentation their due. The illustrations by Megan Gafford will certainly help. Best to wait and watch him play where the conditions suit the game.

John Julius Reel’s memoir My Half Orange: A Story of Love and Language in Seville was published by Tortoise Books in 2023. On Substack, he writes in English and Spanish at Rants from a Foreign Land. He reviews books on his YouTube channel Book Rants.

1. No, they’re all good! - The Editor

2. Henchman isn’t necessarily the best one; just the one that seemed most serializable. - Ed