Customer Reviews

From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Minister Faust is dealing with a host of serious issues -- race relations, societal structures, psychotheraphy, individual responsibility vs. societal forces -- in the clever guise of a superhero novel. His satire of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Spider-Man are dead on, and he broadly hints that we're not supposed to take our narrator, the analyst Dr. Brain, at her word. The character of X Man, one of the deepest and most literate I've encountered in urban fantasy, is a genuine hero, combatting his own past and the forces he perceives are against him at the same time. What we get is a multi-layered and ultimately disturbing narrative that makes political points while humanizing these superhuman beings. And Faust keeps the action coming, too. Indeed, the personal is the political, although you won't get that from Dr. Brain.

I won't comment on the story line, since you will (I hope) find out for yourself. Instead let me talk about the book's character.

The book is wonderfully complicated.

The characters are horribly disfunctional in so many believable ways.

There are tens of subtle jokes per page. No, I mean per paragraph. No, per sentence.

This author is awesome in his use of language. He is awesome in the breadth of subject matter he touches on. He is beyond awesome in humor.

I haven't been captivated by brilliant language, stunning depth, and engrossing story line in any book since The Big U, by Neal Stephenson, came out more than 20 years ago.

(Before I go on, no I am not related to Grand Minister Faust.)

This SF story is completely ridiculous and impossible.

You will find that you are living it today. In reading this, you will gain insights which you can use (if only to laugh about) in your life tomorrow.

This is the book you will read, then buy more copies of to loan to your friends.

Its a blast. Now I am going to turn back to page 1 and read it again.

... why hasn't somebody in comic books done this this well?

This is a book within a book, with a psychiatrist trying to get into the heads of some increasingly anti-social superheroes. Their histories slowly unfold over the course of the tale and involve cataclysms, family drama, and personal vendettas on a par with the classic _The Watchmen_. Awesome read for comic-book fans.

Especially clever are the deliciously exaggerated metaphors and similes Dr. Brain uses, courtesy of our author, Faust. Having read my number of self-help and psychology books, they're true parody gold.

I love superhero stories, but this book was extremely disappointing.

This book is clearly meant to be a satire, but the author has no finesse with his humor. The jokes come on thick, irrelevant, and detract/distract from the already flaccid storyline.

The same is true of his main characters. The parallels to existing superheroes and superhero organizations are blatant and uninspired, and the characters come off uniformly as shallow and insipid. Their personalities are cliché, one dimensional, and propped up with accents and dialects that make merely slogging through the dialogue a feat of superhuman proportion.

The writing itself is mind-numbingly contrived as well. An adverb for every verb, an adjective for every noun, slathered on in a style that invokes images of the author crouching in front of his computer, thesaurus in hand, trying to fill out a novel with fluff instead of plot. Perhaps, given that this book is supposed to be written from the perspective of Dr. Brain, this is intentional - another cliché among many. The difference is academic - I wouldn't recommend this book to ANYONE.

Very well written. Very sophisticated literary effort. A mix of comic books, modern psychology and race relations with a sarcastic edge. It's not like anything I have ever read before. It was very interesting, but I wouldn't rate it among my favorite science fiction works.

Definitely not worth all the hype people have been giving it in these reviews.

I think the story would have benefited from a little less extreme caricature, and perhaps if the author didn't think he was smarter than he really is.

An ok story line, and a fairly imaginative point of view, though it kind of slips on that end. Many of the sub plot points feel forced at times, and some areas feel like the author wanted to see how far he can take the caricature of the character (too far is the answer).

It was brilliant! the start was slow and I almost gave up on it in the first 20 pages, but I muscled through and fell in love. It always seemed obvious which direction it was going until it got there and I realized that I was wrong again. I admit that I read a library copy but I got to this review page because I was planning on buying it so I could read it again. Just great.

I really, really, REALLY enjoyed The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, so was enthusiastic about this one. Unfortunately the satire is a little too dependent on comic-book stereotypes for me to make sense of all the references. Also unlike Coyote Kings, which creates a dreamy, almost childlike world of quests and magic armour in an urban immigrant community, this book has a really snarky tone that I found irritating. To mix a couple of self-referential metaphors, it's like the author is hanging a lampshade on the fourth wall.

One comic *ahem* graphic novel that I HAVE read is the classic "Watchmen" (and yes, I did read it long before the movie came out), and in case it doesn't become blindingly obvious within a few pages, this has an awful lot of parallels to that.

Maybe the most enjoyable parts of this book, for me, were the multiple plot twists laying bare the pretensions, old rivalries, and hang-ups of the characters as originally introduced, so by the time you get to the end, the dynamics of this group of dysfunctional superheroes are completely different. Also, there's some interesting moral and cultural ambiguity since it's not really clear who the good guys and the bad guys are at the end.

A satire, looking at superheroes and the aggrandisement of media shrinks, as well, presumably.

Faust seems to have some background in the comics from which these come, and the book certainly owes a debt to the Giffen and DeMatteis Justice League along with Robert Mayer's Superfolks novel.

In fact, there's an explicit nod to the former in the form of L-Raunzenu (i.e. L-Ron).

The dysfunctional superteam undergoing therapy has analogues of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, and... Dazzler. Yes, that is right. One of the characters is a graduate of the 'Alison Blair Institute for Advanced Disco Studies'. Now your average novelist wouldn't get that, certainly.

He's taken the character everyone has heard of and are the most famous (and even naming one X-Man, to cover the other famous group, although the guy in question is more Malcom X, not a mutant man from the future).

So for those familiar with the form, a lot of this will be a little on the tedious side. So will the psychological technobabble inbetween the story. Although part of the author's point may be that it IS supposed to be annoying.

The main plot deals with the death of the leader of the Fantastic Justice group - a man that appears to have been somewhere between Captain Marvel and Dr Fate, Egyptian style. Very powerful, together, and not in need of high profile shrinks. Hence now dead.

It appears that it is likely murder, and conspiracies within their organisation erupt cause conflict to erupt.


3.5 out of 5

... I was hooked. I was hooked from the moment I started Coyote Kings of the Space Age Bachelor Pad, Minister Faust's previous work, and I was hooked right from the get-go on this one.

There's so much here, so many layers that it boggles the mind. From the superficial Dr. Eva Brain-Silverman to the deeply misunderstood X-Man to the slick and sly Brotherfly, this book pops with flavour, well-developed characters, and a sense of history that's overwhelming. These characters have incredible superpowers, but the most interesting is the X-Man's logogenic powers, I find. He can turn words into anything; is that not what writing creatively is about? It would almost seem that the X-Man may be a bit of the writer himself in a subtle way.

The Flying Squirrel is the crustiest old superhero on the face of the planet; an aging Bruce Wayne parody that is seriously disillusioned with the world. Omnipotent Man is the Superman parody that simply had to be done; he's Superman's hick cousin with a serious problem. Power Grrl is the new girl's idol; smart, bleach-headed blonde with amazing pipes and a HEAT Ray that makes clones of herself, in itself a critique. The Brotherfly is what Spider-man could have become had he been black and bitten by a fly instead of a spider. Iron Lass is the Nordic Wonder Woman, a Valkyrie and the old guard of feminism.

I won't say much more than this; read it. Support this fantastic author and hope that he continues writing to this calibre and wit.