Soon I Will Be Invincible

No, I have not thrown a cog and suddenly turned into a megalomaniac (or at least, more of one than I already was): this is actually the title of a book. I was a little leery when I saw it at Borders, partially because I was thinking of writing a novel about superheros after I finish my current project(s). That, and I was pretty sure that it was going to be a steaming heap of postmodern dreck. You have to be careful with those books that say they have "novel ideas about good and evil". Most modern ideas about good and evil are bunk. However, I encountered the book again on Oo.net when I found out that someone had pre-ordered it and was planning on reading it. So I was in a quandry: maybe it wouldn't be awful after all. Anyway, if you can't tell this little story is leading up to me buying the book and reading it, finally. My opinion can be summed up very succinctly with one syllable, not even a word: eh. It wasn't as bad as I'd feared, but it wasn't as good as I'd hoped. The book asks a lot of questions about what makes a superhero or a supervillian but it never really answers them, either. The two main characters, a super-genius villian (Dr. Impossible) and a newbie hero cyborg (Fatale) posit a lot of potential theories but they don't seem particularly satisfied with their own theories. Certainly none of their actions lead to any sort of resolution; the good guys win because an ambiguously-aligned character allows them to, not because of anything they did. So, not a very satisifying novel. I read in other reviews that it was humorous because there were a lot of "references" to comic-book culture, but I don't read comic books so either I didn't get them or they just weren't that funny. It makes me sad to see a mainstay of incredible melodrama (super heros) made so gray and dull, like wet newspapers. Rating: 2.0