The Dark Side of Super by Matthew Siadak is an enjoyable, well-written, subversive-ish look at superpowers with interesting characters and a mediocre finale.
As with all my reviews, I’ll be objective about the writing technicalities, and specify where I feel something is valid but not to my taste. My final rating will be an average of my objective score and my personal opinion.
I use the Goodreads star scale:
1 = did not like it
2 = it was ok
3 = liked it
4 = really liked it
5 = it was amazing
There are no spoilers in this review.
So what is it?
short_synopsis
A collection of short stories about the dark side of superpowers that culminate in one climax.
plot
There are 11 stories here that could be read individually – each is told from the perspective of a different character and has it’s own arc – but they make far more sense as a whole.
The first two could be read as standalones; in the third, we start to see the joins; by the final two, you’re going to wonder who some of these characters are and what they’re up to if you haven’t read the previous ten. It certainly wouldn’t make sense to read them out of order.
This is not a criticism. I liked the structure, and trying to piece everything together was interesting, although I found it a bit tricky to keep track of all the names, especially as we spent so little time with any of the characters.
As with any collection of stories, some are stronger than others. Just as they were in danger of becoming repetitive, some welcome variation was included.
The main reveal at the end shone a different light on what we’d seen previously, and I’m not sure anyone could predict it. The finale was pretty cool but stereotypical of superhero stories, which was disappointing given how it had been more subversive to that point.
The general theme is that having superpowers may not be as fun as people imagine, and the consequences are as dark as the title suggests.
people
The longest story is 23 pages long, the shortest just 9 (excluding the three sentence epilogue), and it can be tricky to create a connection with a character in such a short space of time. The level of success varied.
I liked how the personalities were often impacted by the power they had, and how they needed to adapt to live with it. This was particularly effective in story 7, Front Row Seat, in which Phoebe is able to hear the thoughts of others so never leaves her home and always wears noise-cancelling headphones with a concoction of noise blaring.
Only one of these characters could maybe be called a “hero”; the others seem more interested in either making the most of it for themselves, or trying to limit the problems it causes them.
There was a repeated focus on breathing. Many of the characters battle anxiety of one form or another, and they all try to control it by managing their breathing. If this was intended to be a running theme or link between the stories, I didn’t catch a purpose to it; instead I think it would have been more effective to have them use different methods to cope, adding another layer of differentiation between characters that were sometimes difficult to separate.
place
This book is set in a generic modern-day city. The stories are far more focussed on the characters and their specific location(s) when we’re with them, and there’s little about the wider world.
Too much world-building would have slowed everything down, so I think limiting it was a decent choice, but I think it could have been improved by making what was there a little more characterful.
prose
The descriptive writing was one of this book’s main strengths. These being short stories, there weren’t long passages of it; instead it was efficient and effective.
The dialogue suffers a little by comparison, and sometimes says too much, with characters speaking their feelings when subtext would have felt more realistic. One of the stories leans on banter more than the others, and it fell flat for me, but that can be a personal thing and others may enjoy it.
Some readers can be wary of the quality of indie authors, but that would be unfounded here. I noticed a couple of minor issues that evaded editing, but no more than I’ve seen in big-name traditionally-published books.
conclusion
I really liked this concept and I thought four of the eleven shorts were very good. None of them were bad, but the finale was disappointingly generic given how this was supposed to be a non-typical depiction of superheroes. Overall, I enjoyed the experience.
I wouldn’t have any qualms about recommending this to someone who likes superhero stories but is looking for something with more realistic/relatable characters than in most comics or graphic novels.
The highs would be enough to give this 4 out of 5, but there are lows (especially those last 2 shorts) which drag it down.
My score: 3 out of 5
A list of the book reviews posted to my blog is here.
Arrowmaker Books 