HEROES FALL by Morgon Newquist

Silver Empire, the rising small publisher of some fine SFF titles (see my mini-reviews here and here), is embarking on an exciting new project in the superhero fiction arena: Heroes Unleashed, a series of superhero novels by various authors all set in a common universe. (The link goes to a Kickstarter campaign that runs to Tuesday, so you can still get in on the ground floor.) So far there are five authors with novels in the pipeline, nearly ready for press, and I had the privilege of seeing a draft of the first of them—SERENITY CITY: HEROES FALL, by Morgon Newquist, a fast-paced, enthralling novel that fills in the reader on some of the tantalizing hints from her previous Serenity City stories (“Blackout”, which you can read in PARAGONS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF SUPERHEROES, and “The Gala”, which appears in HA! HA! HA: A SUPERVILLAIN ANTHOLOGY), while leaving plenty to look forward to in future installments.

Amatopia has an excellent review of HEROES FALL here, on which my meager reviewing powers cannot improve. I’ll just add a couple points of appreciation for this book: I loved how Serenity City itself gets more and more fleshed out as a backdrop for the action. The run-down Greycoast where amateur superheroine Victoria Westerdale (no supername for this unpretentious young lady) defends the underdogs with whom she sympathizes and identifies, and also the location of the abandoned Silver Coast Laboratories, where the mysterious Event that turned so many ordinary people into Primes with superpowers took place decades ago. Rhiannon Park, with its 20-foot-tall statues of two of the city’s great superheroes, dedicated by the still rather mysterious Riley Hirsch: who had erected no statue to her own father, the third superhero of the legendary Triumvirate. Northmill Heights Penitentiary, where Achilles, that third, is now incarcerated, following his Rampage of twenty years ago. The Argall Manor house where Riley, heiress to Rhiannon Argall’s fortune, began her life. The Fina Hill Cemetery, which—like so much in this book—turns out to have rather more in it than appears at first glance. As I got to know Serenity City I found myself wanting to see more of it, and more of the spots I know and like already. Seems like this bodes well for the series.

One of the circumstances that make Serenity City seem more real, and more intriguing, is there’s a lot about the superheroes that is not public knowledge: and not only points connected with their secret identities. Twenty years after Achilles’s Rampage, no one knows what really happened to trigger it. No one really understands what Pendragon’s superpower is, or how the supervillain Blackout was killed, or whence came Thanatos (his successor in supervillainy, who seems to have appeared about the time Blackout exited… hmmm, I wonder…), or what really motivates him to induce superheroes to their own destruction. Some of these things we find out in the course of the book, some may remain forever unclear; in a way it’s like real life, where we never get the answers to questions like what happened to Jimmy Hoffa, or who wrote the anonymous op-ed in the New York Times this past week, or how Harry Reid got so rich as a U.S. Senator. Why would we expect superheroes to make detailed information about their own challenges or limitation common knowledge?

Victoria Westerdale herself is an awesome character. She’s superstrong but not supertough, so superheroics carry serious risk for her. But she carries on in the most thankless job that Serenity City offers for a superhero, protecting the people least able to repay her, sacrificing the rewards of a normal life merely from her own sense of personal responsibility as the steward of her powers. The choice she makes at the climax of the book is both surprising and natural for her, and marks her transition to a new life as a mature superheroine. I’m eager to read more of her adventures.

Did I mention that this series has a Kickstarter campaign going? It still has a couple days left as I write this. It's fully funded (since about 11 hours into the campaign!), and as you can guess, I think it's highly worthwhile.

I’ve heard talk that someone may be working with Silver Empire on some kind of comic book version of these novels: I’m mainly a novel reader, but I’d be interested in those.