Author: Tim Nolen
Publisher: Tim Nolen
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!
Erratum:
P13 "Yeah, we'll you'll need…" should be "Yeah, well you'll need…"
I don’t do covers because this blog is about writing and writers have little or nothing to do with the cover (unless they self-publish). Covers are all about misdirection, fluff, and advertising and generally have nothing to do with the story. In this case, the only reason I found the cover interesting was that the design of the silhouetted superhero's chest looks like a face - the two white roundels on the upper pectorals look like eyes, the straight vertical line dividing the pecs looks like a nose, the rounded lower portions of the pecs look like cheeks or jowls, and the cape billowing away to the right (as we look at the image) looks like long, flowing hair! Fluff.
This novel is 47 chapters in 114 pages which means really short chapters, especially since the text is pretty much double-spaced. It's a very short novel - perhaps even a novella (I don’t know the word count) - but then it’s part of the inevitable series, the whole point of which is to keep spinning the story out as long as possible. I should say up front that I don’t do series unless they're exceptional, and few are. I am not planning on following this one.
The novel doesn’t have a prologue - which I never read anyway. Instead, the author wisely put the prologue - where the old guard superheroes meet their come-uppance - into chapter one. See? It can be done, folks! Tim Nolen proved it!
This first chapter is trope and clichéd superhero stuff, which I was willing to put up with in the hope that the new generation in the following chapters would have something different and original to offer. They didn’t. It was just more of the same. I ran into a small problem on page three where I read, "…rabbit punched her in the face…" A 'rabbit punch' is a blow to the neck - so it’s impossible by definition to rabbit punch someone in the face! Oh well….
In the very next paragraph the author confuses smoke with darkness - either that or the properties of a typical night vision image intensifier with the properties of a thermal imaging camera, by having someone with "night vision goggles" able to see through smoke, but let's let that slide by in its sentence fragment, because, in general, the writing wasn't too bad. There were however some real clunkers such as that on page 11, where I found this odd phrase describing part of a fight between younger generation hero 'Defiant' and super-villain 'The Wrecking Crew': "…sending Defiant sailing down the block, taking an enclosed bus stop with him. Defiant landed out into an intersection..." 'landed out into'? Fortunately most of it was good English.
One of the major problems with this for me was that it’s not a graphic novel, but it read like one. I didn’t see that as a point in its favor. Had it been accompanied by panels of images on each page, then it would have felt like it was much more in its element. It just felt wrong for a text novel because there's no real attempt at descriptive or detail writing here, nor is there any attempt at creating atmosphere. It’s all straight-forward depiction of fights between heroes and villains, conversations, and preparations for the next fight. There's no world-building going on here - no deeper context.
After Defiant comes up with a smart decision on how to take down Wrecking Crew, he carts him off to jail, where we learn that the jail has a nullifier device which cancels the villains' powers. I was immediately thinking: if this is the case, how come the cops don't simply use one out in the field to nullify the villains' powers and arrest them? Why do we need superheroes? How come the villains don’t have one to use against the superheroes? Apparently the reason for this is that there is only the one and it’s huge - buried in the ground under the six cells it powers.
There was one incident which I felt was rather racist, which is where some thugs threaten a character named Veronica, and Defiant comes to her rescue. This is yet another instance of a girl needing rescue by a guy, but that wasn't even the worst part of it. The thugs were given dialog that sounded like a white person's ill-considered attempt at 'Ebonics' - thereby identifying the thugs as black. I don't know if this was the intention or not, but the implied association of 'black' with 'thug' wasn't appreciated. I can't speak to whether the entire cast of this story (apart from aforementioned thugs) was white, because there really was very little description of anything.
As if that wasn't bad enough, the major villain's name was Blackheart! He is the one who negates the four main superheroes at the start, but he reminded me of Doctor Evil in the Austin Powers movies! He just didn’t seem like a real villain - more like a caricature. I made it to fifty percent of the way through this book before I ditched it. It just wasn't interesting enough to keep pushing on, not when there are so many other books out there which I know will pull me in and hold my attention. I can’t rate this as a worthy read.
