Book Review: "Superheroes"
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It’s time for a book review! And this time, I’m reviewing Superheroes.
I can already hear you. “Yeah, we know, Tien. You always review superheroes. What book are you reviewing?”
I’ll save us all the Who’s On First reimagining and clarify that I am about to review Superheroes, edited by Rich Horton.
Superheroes is an anthology of short stories written by numerous authors, including Margaret Ronald, Kelly Link, Daryl Gregory, Ian McDonald, Leah Bobet, Matthew Johnson, James Patrick Kelly, Aaron Schutz, Jei D. Marcade, Ian Donald Keeling, Kat Beyer, Joseph Mallozi, Peter S. Beagle, Carol Emshwiller, Elana Fortin, and Gord Sellar, and assembled by Horton. Many of these authors are behind some pretty big works, with Beagle being the writer of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Sarek”. So yeah, a lot of talent here.
For the most part, these stories were compiled from other sources, such as Strange Horizons, a non-profit speculative fiction magazine. One of the stories is an episode of Shadow Unit, an ongoing episodic mystery series featuring a division of the FBI that solves “anomalous” crimes (heck, you can even find the episode, “Wild Card”, on their site and available in full for free. You’re welcome).
This review will be a little bit different than most. It’s an anthology book, so there isn’t one story, one world, one set of characters to review. It’s….*goes back to count*....sixteen separate stories. So I can’t break it down into sections for style, story, and character like I usually do. Instead, I’ll talk a bit about the book as a whole and then go briefly into the individual stories.
So let’s take a look at Superheroes, edited by Rich Horton. And we’ll be going over both the whole book and the individual tales that comprise it.
The Whole Book
Superheroes has a very distinct feel to it all. It’s hard to explain.The back blurb highlights that superheroes have “great power tempered with flaws”, and that the stories within will remind us of “the extraordinary powers of the imagination”!
There’s a vibe to it all that, honestly, I don’t usually like, strange as it is to hear. It’s tough to explain but…. Okay, this will probably come off bad, but hear me out.
Do you remember in, like, high school, you probably had to read books about the experience of people in XYZ culture from XYZ demographic, possibly in XYZ country? Like, fiction, I mean. Stories that were written by ____ authors that were ultimately about the experience of being part of _____ culture? My friend gave me an anthology book years ago called Night Market, featuring stories by Taiwanese authors essentially about the Taiwanese experience, centering around Taiwan’s famous night markets. I never read it; I just don’t care and that sort of story just doesn’t interest me (sorry, buddy!).
I feel like Superheroes is sort of this, but with superheroes. Which makes it far more interesting to me.
These aren’t your standard superhero tales, after all. The stories in here aren’t about powerful figures in colorful costumes using their superhuman abilities for good.
Instead, they explore different elements of our society and our humanity, often using superheroes as a setting or a lens rather than as an explicit genre. One can certain wonder whether superheroes are a genre or a setting, and the short stories in this collection aim for the latter, using superheroes as a vehicle to tell stories that are really about family dysfunctionality, teenage vulnerability, the difficulty of rehabilitation, the harsh transactional nature of the employee-employer relationship, and dignity of death in old age.
But don’t worry! People do get super-punched at some point.
Despite the name of the collection, Superheroes isn’t really about superheroes. It’s about….us? Yeah, us. All of us. Our world. And it just uses superheroes to highlight what each story is really about.
The Individual Tales
Superheroes is, as a collection, a great work. I enjoyed it far more than I thought I would.
Of course, with sixteen individual stories, the quality is hit or miss. Mostly “hit”, of course, given the skill and background of the authors writing them, but hit or miss all the same. Some of them were amazing, and some of them didn’t land.
You’ll forgive me if I don’t go into detail on each story. I’ll just give a paragraph or so on each one.
“Sunlight Society” by Margaret Ronald was, honestly, a very weak start to the collection. Slow to get to the point despite being only twelve pages long, with its worldbuilding consisting entirely of jargon that seems more cyberpunk than superhero and that seems to assume we know all that’s going on, it just focuses on the existence of secret shadow organizations and….not really much else.
“Secret Identity” by Kelly Link does a lot better of a job sucking you in. The story isn’t a superhero story at all, but rather a story about a fifteen year old girl who travels to New York to meet a man she met on the Internet while posing as her 30-something year old sister. Her isolation, naivete, and self-doubt really radiate a sense of youthful vulnerability that, truthfully, should remind us why teenage superheroes really aren’t a good idea (says person writing story with teenage superheroes). She’s no child, but she’s no adult either, reminding us of why people at that young age need to be protected and cared for and how susceptible they are to being taken advantage of.
The superhero aspect of it all is seemingly unnecessary as she simply stays at a hotel that is having a conference and no superhumans play a role in the story, but I think there’s some pretty good symbolism going on there. There’s two conferences going on at her hotel–one for dentists and the other for superheroes. The two extremes of the mundane and the extraordinary. It all mirrors her situation perfectly.
“The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm” by Daryl Gregory takes a long, hard look at life in a perpetual warzone. No doubt inspired by the plight of the Palestinians, the Syrians, or any other group living in a world of endless poverty and bombings by global superpowers, the story shines a light on the perspective of a girl and her younger brother enduring the worst of what the developed world has to offer. I can only think of how much this parallels Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinians following the October 7, 2023 attacks, as Western superheroes launch a disproportionately devastating retaliation against an off-brand Latveria when an off-brand Doctor Doom captures and brutalizes one of them.
I’m fortunate enough to have never grown up in a war-torn country, but this is a pretty realistic look at life in one. Once you get past the talking fish man and the killer robots, of course. The fantastic elements play a backseat to the real, focusing on a family and a community’s experience as victims of what is essentially an American bombing campaign and the human toll it takes.
“Tonight We Fly” by Ian McDonald certainly wasn’t a standout story, but a competent and compelling one nonetheless. It centers around an aging superhero, long retired, and his desire to live a peaceful life with his wife without the hassle of noisy neighbors and a disrespectful society.
That disrespect is the heart of the story, mirroring in some ways the experiences of veterans who fought in World War II and other conflicts, who put their lives on the line for their country only to be treated as an afterthought afterwards by a generation who’s all but forgotten about their service and sacrifice.
“Wild Card” by Leah Bobet was one of my favorites in this collection. It’s not actually a superhero story, but it does explicitly call upon the tropes of the genre. It’s a Season 4 episode of Shadow Unit, as I mentioned above, an episodic police procedural in the vein of Law & Order and CSI. The FBI’s Anomalous Crimes Task Force, the “shadow unit” the series centers around, must get to the bottom of a series of bank robberies committed by someone with a flair for supervillainy and superhuman abilities suited for bank robberies.
I don’t know much about Shadow Unit, I’ll admit. But it’s kind of like how I don’t know much about CSI but I can still sit down and enjoy the mystery being solved in that episode. The story is even written in that sort of contemptuous-towards-non-mainstream-culture way that these shows are often written in. Apparently, comic book fans really are funk-ridden neckbeards that literally believe themselves to be superheroes and villains. It’s still a great little short story, either way.
“Heroic Measures” by Matthew Johnson takes “Tonight We Fly” to the only place it can eventually go; the dignity of death on one’s own terms. A woman must deal with her husband's confinement to a hospital bed as old age takes him, but his superpowers won’t let him die peacefully. The story is one in which she must come to terms with his deteriorating condition, and where the most heroic thing she can do is find a way to allow him to pass on.
The big plot twist of this story is never stated, but heavily implied. I won’t spoil it, but I feel like my big “a-ha!” moment was way later than it was for everyone else.
“The Biggest” by James Patrick Kelly was alright. Taking place during the Great Depression, an ex-con tries to rehabilitate himself by going to New York City, where he can hopefully make it big as a superhero named Stiltman. A chance meeting with then-Governor Franklin Roosevelt is his first attempt at trying to make and leverage connections to get a leg up over the competition, mirrored by his own ability to grow large.
I couldn’t help but imagine this as an old black and white film as I read it. I also couldn’t help but think about how unprepared our capitalist society is at taking care of the penniless and hopeless, where even those of extraordinary talent and ability find themselves struggling to stand out for just an opportunity to “make it” while the vast majority of those in the same position are doomed to a life of squalor and misery. I also learned that a bar a friend and I used to go to a lot near Union Square used to be a speakeasy. The way the story describes its layout is accurate to how it looks like in real life. I liked that.
“Dr. Death Vs The Vampire” by Aaron Schutz was another enjoyable one. The story follows an empath nurse who kills people that are “lost and forgotten”, in so much pain and agony yet unable to manage their own pain. He takes the lives of those who want to die, but can’t. While on an interstate bus trip, he discovers an elderly woman in need of his “services”, and the vampire feeding off her pain.
The topic isn’t waxed poetically over, but there’s a bit of a thematic overlap with “Heroic Measures”. Dignity in death. Passing painlessly, surrounded by those who care for you? Or to suffer alone and forgotten? Needless to say, the ethics of assisted suicide are the thematic focal point of Schutz’s tale, though they are not touched too heavily on. Not explicitly, at least. Which is good, because that is a topic well beyond the scope of this writing and superheroes blog.
“Superhero Girl” by Jei D. Marcade is a weird one, and appropriately so. It’s one of the shorter stories in the collection about a woman named Ofelia who is a superhero….or crazy. The first person narrator, her boyfriend, certainly doesn’t know.
I don’t really have much to say. It’s a short little tale that bleeds the fantastic with the mad and leaves you to wonder where the line is drawn.
“Super. Family” by Ian Donald Keeling was another standout story featuring a dysfunctional superhero family, many of whom are keeping secrets from each other.
When Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four, the idea was to take the idea of a superhero team to the next level and create a superhero family, with all the dysfunction that can sometimes come with it. This takes that up a few notches. It’s clear from the beginning that the protagonist has wronged his family in a grave way, a way that has destroyed the trust and faith his loved ones have in him. Yet there’s also the desire to do right by them, to maintain the relationship, to repair what was broken. Because one’s bond with their family can be as strong as any superpower, regardless if you are a hero or villain.
“The Strange Desserts of Professor Natalie Doom” by Kat Beyer was okay. Kind of forgettable. It was about a little girl who grows up to be a supervillain mad scientist baker. The descriptions of her hijinks as a child were cute. Otherwise, this six page story is pretty forgettable.
“Downfall” by Joseph Mallozzi would probably be my choice for the best story of this collection. Focusing heavily on themes of change and the tug-of-war between a life you once had and a life you want to create, a seemingly ordinary suburban husband is tasked by federal agents in investigating the embarrassing and public death of a superhero.
At 48 pages, Mallozzi’s story could easily be adapted into a movie. It’s got a great opening sequence and we see the main character, Marshal, struggle between not living up to the life his wife and mother want from him and being called back to a former self-destructive one as he finds himself back in his hometown that’s changed for the worse. We get fantastic character interactions and great battle sequences, twists and turns, and closure to plot elements at the end that we didn’t realize we needed. My jaw dropped as I read the final lines. It’s all in all a great tale and a welcome addition to Superheroes.
“Dirae” by Peter S. Beagle is another standout one, and yet it took me more than a moment to get into. That was because the first page had such short sentences that I honestly thought it was a poem about superheroes. I’m not into poetry.
But the actual story–and not my dumb assumption of what the story would be–focuses on a person who can’t stop fighting crime….because every time she stops one, she blacks out and wakes up to find herself stopping another. It reminds me of how people in the Marvel, DC, and other universes must see superheroes–and, to a lesser extent, how we in the real world see service workers and people who are supposed to help us. That is, they don’t exist outside of them swooping in and saving the day from evil. We know that Spider-Man is actually a teenager-to-twentysomething freelance photographer from Queens named Peter Parker. But in the Marvel universe, I bet there’s a lot of people who aren’t even certain there’s a person under the suit. Just some ethereal being. And others probably never even thought of where Spidey goes when he swings away.
“Grandma” by Carla Ermshwiller was another short six pager. It’s about a physically disabled little girl who lives with and looks up to her grandmother, a former superhero. Honestly, it’s pretty empty. There’s not much to say about it. They live out in the wilderness and the girl does small, heroic gestures like rescuing small animals. There’s far less emotion than there should be. Even the narrator doesn’t seem to care.
“The Los Angeles Women’s Auxiliary Superhero League” by Elana Fortin is even more skippable. A group of professional modern women in LA find they have superpowers and fight a third rate villain. Offscreen. And everyone loves them and they’re gonna be a great crimefighting team and everything.
Also, I think the main character’s boss is Ari from Entourage. Without any of the cursing, yelling, insults, or anything that made him entertaining.
“Wongjjang and the Madman of Pyongyang” by Gord Sellar is the last story in this book, and while it had potential, I don’t think it stuck the landing. It follows Wongjjang, the superhero persona of Jang Wong, the leader of a team of shoopah, which I think is implied to translate to foreign superheroes. The team is employed by the LG Corporation in South Korea, and takes place in a world where Korean Unification is closing in and threatening make sociopolitical and economic changes that Wongjjang isn’t ready for.
I feel like this story could have really been better. It focuses heavily on how looming cultural change can make one feel like their place in the world is coming to an end, and a spotlight is shone very heavily on the imbalance nature of the employer-employee relationship, and workplace culture as a whole. But it has confusing action scenes that are hard to follow and the sort of happy “everyone gets a girlfriend” dance party ending that you expect in an Adam Sandler comedy.
Seriously, the protagonist marries a college girl that he met in the last scene who has the power to secrete cognac from her body and he tells his cousins, “After we make love, I can sip it from her armpits. I asked her to grow out her armpit hair, so it collects better.”
Forget Adam Sandler comedy. That makes me think of creepy harem anime fanfiction.
Final Thoughts
Superheroes is an anthology collection that may not have started or ended strong, but contained far more enjoyable stories than not. “Downfall”, “Wild Card”, “Super. Family”, and “The Illustrated Biography or Lord Grimm” alone are well worth the price of admission. Even “Wongjjang and the Madman of Pyongyang” was really good until it got really weird. “Secret Identity” was also incredibly engaging, another one of my favorites.
And the reason for this, I think, is that they aren’t really about superheroes.
In his introduction, Rich Horton writes “....fiction is more interesting when dealing with human scale problems. And much superhero fiction shows that with great power often comes….fairly mundane personal problems.”
I agree. Not that any of the stories in this collection were just general “superhero stops supervillain from conquering the world” fares, but the stories I mentioned I liked the most really did focus more on the ordinary than the extraordinary. Family. Teenage independence. Workplace culture. Change. War. Or at least a police procedural mystery.
These “mundane” problems are what make superheroes engaging. Any superhero can stop a death ray, or an alien invasion, or a rampaging cyborg. But the best Superman stories see him grappling with his place as a near godlike alien in a world of mortal men. Spider-Man stood out from the bunch by focusing on the broken personal life of Peter Parker. The X-Men are at their best when they take a stand against bigotry and hate. Interest in Iron Man was revitalized when he battled alcoholism.
And collectively, Superheroes gets this.
You may not like every story in Superheroes, but if you like books and you like superheroes (which, if you’re here, you probably like at least one), then this is a worthy addition to your reading collection.
For exciting superhero fiction written by me, be sure to check out the BLUE EAGLE Universe!