Chapter 1

One-sentence summary: Charlie Fitzer eats peanut butter toast at his kitchen island while CNBC's Squawk Box informs him, on live television, that his estranged billionaire uncle Jake Baldwin has died.

Paragraph summary

A weekday morning in a tired Barrington, Illinois kitchen. Thirty-two-year-old Charlie Fitzer — laid-off Chicago Tribune business reporter, divorced, currently substitute teaching, currently living back in his childhood house — is making peanut butter toast and half-watching CNBC on his iPad when anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin announces, with the polite gravity of business television, that Charlie's reclusive uncle Jake Baldwin, third-largest parking-structure magnate in North America, has died of pancreatic cancer. Hera, the orange-and-white cat who recently emerged from the backyard bushes and "informed Charlie through meowing that she lived with him now," watches him absorb the news. The chapter establishes the protagonist's voice — sardonic, self-aware, dryly resigned — and the gap between his dwindling little life and the fortune he just learned was distantly his. He talks to the cat about it. The cat is paying attention.

Key scenes

• Kitchen-island morning routine: peanut butter, knife, butter dish, iPad propped against something
• News alert — Sorkin's voice over a stock-market chyron, ticker scrolling
• Hera at her station — observing, unbothered
• Charlie's interior monologue lands the dry-humor tone

Characters referenced

• Charlie Fitzer (POV) — substitute teacher, ex-business journalist, divorced, broke
• Hera (cat) — orange-and-white, recently arrived from the backyard bushes
• Uncle Jake Baldwin (off-page, dead) — reclusive billionaire, parking-structure mogul
• Andrew Ross Sorkin (real-world, on screen) — voice of the announcement

Locations / settings

• Charlie's childhood kitchen, Barrington, Illinois (Chicago suburbs) — modest, lived-in, mid-century-ish

Visual motifs

• Late-summer morning light through suburban kitchen window
• Cream linoleum / butcher block / wood cabinets — tired but warm
• Glow of an iPad propped on the counter, the only "modern" element
• Peanut butter, a knife, toast crumbs — the smallest possible breakfast
• Hera as a still center: a cat's gravity at the edge of frame
• Implied wealth-gap: a cathode-ray-blue ticker in a beige room

Atmosphere

Sleepy, suburban, a touch melancholy. The first beat of a story that will become enormous, played at the exact volume of a Tuesday.

Source references

• https://www.torforgeblog.com/2023/06/12/excerpt-reveal-starter-villain-by-john-scalzi/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starter_Villain

Confidence

High — this scene is taken almost line-for-line from the publisher-released excerpt.