Review: Not bad for what it is...
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 3, 2012
... but what it is isn't particularly impressive.There are three ways to write a superhero novel:1- Write a normal urban fantasy, cyberpunk, high fantasy, etc novel, and put your protagonist (or, alternately, your Villains) in spandex and/or robosuits.  See, for instance, the Ex-Heroes series.  The weakness of this is that it's rather transparent and you're unlikely to fool anybody.2- Write a genuinely original story based in creative re-interpretation of common superhero tropes (the "how to succeed in evil" route) complete with at least some deconstruction, lampshading of the ridiculous, and so on.  The weakness of this is that it expects a lot of literacy for an audience that must also have a very pronounced interest in comics, which are, at the end of the day, picture books with corny captions.3- Just write a story outline for an actual comic book without bothering to get an illustrator/inker/etc (the "wearing the cape" route).  The weakness of this is that half of the fun of superhero comics is the setup for a splash page illustration of something significantly awesome looking, worthy of being airbrushed on the side of god's van by the angel Radicael.  That climactic payoff is going to be somewhat inherently weaker when you just write "climactic duel on giant chess-board trap thing" rather than actually drawing it out.  In fact, in text it seems kind of trite and stupid.This story is, don't get me wrong, a _good_ example of the third category, but the category itself is just fundamentally weak in a profound way and not really enjoyable.  Three stars is as high as I can go.