Who Can Save Us Now?: Brand-New Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories [Paperback]

Most short story collections I have read have been fairly even in the stories contained within the particular collection, as far as how much I have enjoyed them or how well I felt they were written. Who Can Save Us Now? is an exception to that.

There are several very good stories that I enjoyed quite a bit - notably Tom Biessell's My Interview with the Avenger and Owen King's The Meerkat.

However, others were not up to par for me, with weak, obvious or missing plots (In Cretaceous Seas, Mr. Big Deal).

The good ones were worth getting through the not-so-good ones, none of them are overly long to feel your time was wasted. Four or five stars for the good ones, two or three for the others, average rating for the book of three stars.

Usually when I'm reading an anthology I'll find a few outstanding stories sandwiched in between tales of varying quality. So you can imagine my surprise as I made my way through this collection and found story after story after story that delighted and impressed me. The origin stories were definitely my favorite, but I appreciated all the different takes on the superhero genre, and was happy to experience characters that were new and immediately accessible. If you like fantastical tales, but don't want to deal with the decades of continuity attached to folks like Spiderman, Superman, and the X-Men, this collection is your answer. It proves, without a shadow of a doubt, that superheroes are more complex than we give them credit for, and gives comic book fans a new form in which to experience their preferred method of storytelling. Chris Burnham's illustrations are an added bonus, capturing the essence of each piece with his skillful hand.

The last decade or so has seen a remarkable "legitimization" of graphic storytelling, be ranging from indie "comix" to the superhero genre. The latter is a genre that's come to dominate the summer movie season, and with literati such as Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon as its paladins, it shouldn't be surprising that more and more fiction writers find it intriguing. This collection of twenty-two stories, six of which appeared previously in such places as Virginia Quarterly Review and One Story, gathers some of these experiments in an attempt to reimagine the superhero's place in our everyday real world. One note of caution is necessary: though the word "superhero" appears in the subtitle and on the jacket, it might convey the wrong message. The protagonists of these stories are not so much heroes as they are people with paranormal abilities or attributes -- which are sometimes put to heroic purposes and sometimes not. So, if you're looking for new takes on the traditional Superman/Batman/Wolverine/Etc. superhero, you might be disappointed.

However, if what you're looking for are interesting writers taking on an interesting premise, then you won't be disappointed. I tend to measure anthologies by their ratio of stories I'm glad to have read vs. stories I'm not glad to have read, and that usually works out to roughly 1:2. In this case the ratio is reversed, and there are really only two or three stories I really didn't care for. I generally really like Jim Shepard, but his "In Cretaceous Seas" just didn't work for me, and feels somewhat shoehorned into this collection (it previously appeared in Vice). And Richard Dooling's "Roe #5" was a rather conventional clone-gone-wild story. But almost every story has at least one interesting idea or conceit that makes it worth reading. For example, although I didn't love Will Clarke's "The Pentecostal Home for Flying Children," I did enjoy the notion of a horny superhero leaving behind a bunch of bastard children with the ability to fly.

My favorite stories were probably the melancholy ones, such as David Yoo's tragicomic "The Somewhat Super," about a secret support group for those with useless paranormal powers, or Scott Snyder's "The 13th Egg," about a sailor whose exposure to atomic bomb tests in the Pacific turns him into a post-traumatic stress victim with mutant powers. The two real stunning pieces were Cary Holladay's "The Horses Are Loose," about a girl who can only use her power once in her life and must make the difficult choice of when to do so, and J. Robert Lennon's "The Rememberer," about a girl whose perfect memory dooms her to a lifetime of sorrow. Which is not to suggest there aren't some more whimsical pieces, most notably Sam Weller's "The Quick Stop 5," about a colorful crew of convenience store workers who are transformed into strange superheroes after inhaling some toxic fumes. Other standouts include Tom Bissell's mock Esquire-style magazine profile of a vigilante superhero and Stephanie Harrell channelling a somewhat jaded Lois Lane on the topic of Superman's early days.

On the whole, the collection works well as both an accessible introduction to some of American short fiction's young talent, and as an example of how a mostly visual genre can be reimagined in fiction.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 18 reviews  3.2 out of 5 stars