I picked up this book because I'm a sucker for two things (that I'm going to mention anyway). One, I'm an unreformed comic book kid and, two, I love alternate points of view. I have always been attracted to things which treat the status-quo from a slightly different angle. In the end, though, I am left feeling conflicted. On the one hand, it was a fun read, but on the other hand I think it fell well short of its potential.
What we have here is essentially a prose comic book, with the narration alternating between the villain and one of the heroes. The interesting bit, of course, is that Grossman is working with entirely new characters. It's not as though he was looking at a series and funneling it into a novel, which has been done without success so far as I've seen. Instead, he presents an Earth seemingly bursting with super-powered humans, aliens, and robots. There is a celebrity culture about many of them, and one even has an agent. It's almost treated like a career choice, as several of the heroes are powered by chemical or mechanical implants. It's a total geek scenario to imagine that anyone of of us could manufacture our own origin story and become a superpowered version of ourselves, but entertaining nonetheless (I would be Gravitron, by the way, master of the unseen force of attraction).
The villain, one Doctor Impossible, is much more interesting as a narrator than Fatale, the cyborg hero. He has a slightly ironic, tongue-in-cheek voice when he ruminates over the course of his life. He frequently discusses the futility of being a super-villain, but almost approaches it with an 'it's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it' attitude. He remembers fondly some of his best schemes which just didn't come off, everything from time travel to a giant city-smashing robot (robots are kind of his thing). It's during these meditations, however, that I think Grossman really missed an opportunity to do something great.
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