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This one did not turn out so short:'Masks: Rise of Heroes’ – Hayden Thorne
Vintage City, a location deliberately kept looking well, vintage, finds itself with its very own super hero. A hot super hero, that Eric Williams would just love to have him. Where there are super heroes, super villains always follow. It’s not long before Vintage City’s hero Magnifiman and the villainous Devil’s Trill are knocking bits out of the city, while a mysterious sidekick flits around helping to fight crime.
While crime statistics explode, romance begins to grow between Eric and his best friend Peter. Their girl mate Althea alternates between anger and affection towards them, as she had a huge crush on Peter*. It’s not only romantic tension coming between the friends, as it seems that Eric’s friends may be keeping secrets. Can he deal with what they’re hiding?
In the first book of her ‘Masks’ series Hayden Thorne has managed to critique the default perception that superheroes are always straight. When Magnifiman first appears in Vintage City Eric is besotted with him and while he thinks that Magnifiman is probably not gay that doesn’t stop him from fantasising about the green, spandex clad man of his dreams. He even becomes jealous of Magnifiman’s sidekick, who he speculates may be Magnifiman’s romantic partner. When his interest in the superhero pair leads him to trawl role playing sites Eric finds himself noticing the overwhelming amount of straight perspectives reflected by the gamers, who exclusively pair Magnifiman and his sidekick with female romantic partners:
‘In the meantime, Bambi Bailey had been kidnapped, and Magnifiman was tearing the whole city apart to find her because, yes, they’d been engaged in a long, long, long, drawn-out romance marked by unresolved sexual tension. He was hopelessly in love with her, but he refused to acknowledge it. Now he was in danger of losing The Only Woman in the Universe for Him, and he was beside himself…
If I were only halfway decent in role-playing games, I’d have created a gay character who’d give Mary Sue a run for her-or their-money.’
Later it turns out that there is a gay superhero in Vintage City and he’s interested in Eric. That’s how Thorne rolls – may she rock on. Seriously though, she’s attempting to adjust mainstream default thinking that links superheroes with traditional, straight versions of masculinity. She’s also got lots to say about gay bashing and makes a move to talk about how gay men might benefit from the protection of a superhero boyfriend. While Eric and Peter exist in a more tolerant world, they’re not able to be openly affectionate in public and Eric’s parents worry about him getting attacked. There are perhaps too many related messages in this book and some of them are expressed through ideas that will be familiar to many readers, for example when a character compares telling someone you’re a super hero to coming out. Mostly these didactic messages feel well integrated into the novel, possibly because Eric and other characters talk about these issues as things that affect them personally:
‘It was too bad really that other gay kids didn’t enjoy the benefit of the same kind of protection from their boyfriends or girlfriends. I hoped-really hoped- that if there were other people out there who’d yet to come into their powers, some of them were queer.’
Thorne has a lot of fun satirising superhero stories, by looking at the practical issues of living in a town patrolled by superheroes. For Eric, living a regular life while good and evil battle all around him swings between being surreal and tedious. As Vintage City is quite small, everyone can expect to find themselves kidnapped a few times and by the end of the book encounters with the Devil’s Trills henchmen are becoming routinely annoying for the residents of Vintage City. When Eric says ‘I half expected everyone to be given tally sheets, in which we could list the different situations in which we’d fallen victim to the Trill’s schemes and then rescued by Magnifiman…’ he shows that even the most extra-ordinary encounters can become, or almost have to become, mundane when they happen all the time. If everyone in Vintage City went around scared out of their minds, nothing would ever get done.
While ‘Mask: Rise of Heroes’ subversion of the superhero genre is often fun and thought-provoking, the book might be a bit of a disappointment for anyone looking for a traditional, strongly plotted, action heavy story of super battles. The main point of this book isn’t the superhero adventures, or the plots of the villains. The Devil’s Trill’s plots are extremely weak, although that’s logically explained as a consequence of the Trill only just getting his powers. The superhero genesis explanation is interesting* and their powers are cool, if sometimes rather standard (flying, super strength), but their adventures are background noise to Eric’s life in Vintage City. That’s to be expected when the book is told using a first person narrator who isn’t a superhero and it’s a fresh twist, but it’s probably best to be aware that superhero exploits are sometimes shaded in generally, rather than seen in close up.
It’s the relationships between Eric and other characters, like Peter, Althea and Laura, his sister, that form the core of this book. The fact is you could ditch all the superhero razzle, give the characters a real life problem to surmount and this book would still connect deeply because of the high levels of emotional honesty that exist between the characters. Whether they’re pissed off, or in love, the characters commit to their emotions. Saying that, they’re not too stubborn to realise if their emotions aren’t the important part of the current situation and commit to apologising, or forgiveness. This leaves the reader watching the high energy of emotional life, without any ill thought out dramatics designed to increase the page count.
Despite all those wonderful aspects of the book I can’t avoid mentioning that the book suffers from some awkward writing. Thorne uses multiple adjectives to describe thing constantly, for example ‘a dreary, sooty, acid rain-drenched metropolis’ and always attaches descriptive words to objects, like ‘the murky figures of running officers’. This over use of adjectives slows the pace, making the book feel as if it is dragging (I know I am probably the queen of the double adjective, but this is a blog, not a published book) and rendering her narrator overly wry. She also tends to describe Eric’s everyday life in too much detail. While knowing some of Eric’s quirks, like the fact that he puts blue food colouring in his milk, are part of what makes him a unique character, there’s such a thing as too much realistic detail. His examination of his normal actions are sometimes quite humorous, but there are so many of them that he comes to sound too self-conscious and again they slow the text down. It does seem like Thorne deliberately writes in this way to make Eric’s voice precocious, sarcastic, self-aware and self-involved. She succeeds in creating a character who is simultaneously loveable for his originality and the kind of person you want to flick in the head for referring to himself as ‘One’ and dropping high culture references. However, her judgement is off on how often to include all the elements that make him sound precocious and often the book tips into unbearably pompous writing. It doesn’t help that there are a number of typing errors in this book, which make it look a little unprofessional.
I suspect these books are superhero shaped chocolate; fast books, that I’ll love to indulge in if I’m feeling a bit down. Hayden Thorne can write a steamy kissing scene, after all and isn’t that just what a girl needs when she’s feeling blue 9oh yes, ideally there should be beer too)?
* Just by the by, but Peter is half Asian and Althea is black – look it is easy diversity all round
* I would very much like to discuss this with someone – there are Eugenics involved, which are creepy
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