I liked this, didn’t love it. I think Austin Grossman and I just don’t blend well as reader/writer. And it all started out so well!
The book begins from the point of view of Dr. Impossible as he reflects from prison on his life and career as a supervillain. He has been arrested twelve times now, after having almost destroyed the world and/or conquered it, also twelve times. His nemesis is CoreFire, leader of a group of superheroes not unlike the Avengers. The world they live in is chockablock full of heroes and villains, to the point where the book almost reads like realism at points, the characters accepting the wonders around them with all the excitement of somebody dulled up on meds, about to have a root canal.
Dr. Impossible escapes prison for the twelfth time and the story goes from there. His nemesis has disappeared, and the fake Avengers have reunited to track him down. Among that group is Fatale, the book’s other narrator, one of the “heroes,” a cyborg who became a cyborg after a should-have-been-fatal car accident decimated half her body. Fatale was definitely not as interesting a POV character as Dr. Impossible. She seemed really passive and emotionless, despite everything that was going on in her life. In fact, this whole book felt that way, which is especially aggravating after the first couple pages led me to believe it was going to be a clever, tongue-in-cheek sort of book with a more upbeat (yet still dark) tone. It was mostly just bleak and, like the other book I’ve read by Grossman, You, so concerned with trying to Say Something that it stops being fun.
Of course it doesn’t help that some of the themes the novel is concerned with just don’t interest me in the slightest, the biggest of which being Dr. Impossible’s ego-driven actions. I don’t respond well to characters (or authors, or people in real life) whose main concern is whether other people think they’re the smartest person in the room. Slash the world. Slash the universe. Slash all the universes and timelines.
Basically, I wanted this book to be fun, and it wasn’t.
I probably won’t try any more of Grossman’s books, unless one happens to have a particularly interesting premise. But even then, I’m going to think really hard about it before I dive in.
