Written by Peter Clines

Grade: C+

The nerds have won, people. Gone are the days when the acne-riddled, asthma-infused, coke-bottle-glasses-wearing, obese kid in a Land of the Giants T-shirt was regulated to the collective corner of our society. Mainstream audiences are now well versed in subjects such as Batman, Star Wars, Star Trek and all kinds of other estrogen-repulsing things. This isn’t a bad thing. We now get high-budget stories from quality writers and directors and actors and a guy that writes a blog nobody really reads is allowed to have a relationship with a real-live girl. Of course there is a problem, otherwise I wouldn’t have written the last few sentences. That problem is oversaturation. We’ve finally gotten to a point where we can simply reference pop-culture and that is enough to appease the crowds. To be fair, Peter Clines Ex-Heroes isn’t completely guilty of this, he just falls a little short of something better.

This premise of this novel is simple: Superheroes vs. zombies. It’s an awesome enough set-up, and well-written too, though some of the dialogue is a little forced. It’s set in a Los Angeles where super powered beings have risen up and started doing super hero like things, protecting the populace and forming alliances and rivalries that are amazingly destructive. There’s St. George, or The Mighty Dragon, Stealth, Gorgon, Cairax, Cerberus, Zzzapp, and a few others that are of varying degrees of importance. Then the zombie apocalypse comes and the heroes, at least the ones that survive the onslaught, are forced to carve out a slice of the city and protect their new civilization, naturally in the safety of a movie studio lot, they call The Mount. Things go about as well as you can hope, the citizens are mostly safe other than a few minor incidents, until a gang builds up power in another end of the city. They want the resources of The Mount, and they might have a few tricks up their sleeves, including some super-powered beings of their own.

Clines offers up some new additions to the two respective mythologies. The origin of the zombies intertwines with the rise of the superheroes and is a pretty compelling angle. The survivors of the apocalypse, since they’re in Los Angeles, have a running game of who can kill the most famous celebrity zombie. These feel fresh and bring something new to well-worn concepts. This is where the novel shines, but unfortunately it just doesn’t do enough of this kind of thing. For one thing, anybody who knows a decent amount of superhero lore, will be able to spot variations on both DC and Marvel characters in these original heroes. With a few tweaks St. George is Superman, Stealth is Batman, and their relationship is nearly identical to the classic heroes though admittedly with a nice twist of sexual tension. Among others, The Hulk and Iron Man are both essentially there and Captain America is even teased at in the preview for the second book in the series. There’s nothing wrong with this necessarily, except for the fact that I don’t think I would’ve picked up on these similarities if I wasn’t such a nerdlinger myself, which feels a little dishonest to me.

Zombies have had a rough go in pop-culture of late. They’ve never enjoyed more popularity than they do now, but they’ve lost something in the process. Gone are the mindless, soulless nightmares that are terrifying metaphors of ourselves and what we could all become, and in their place are mindless monsters who want to eat humans. They’re more gory, but less scary. Superheroes fighting zombies has the potential to be an amazing allegory for this contemporary world. Gods have come down to protect us from the monsters threatening to turn us completely into a mindless consumer society. Our very souls are at stake. What is too often missed is that it’s not our lives that are on the line in a zombie apocalypse, but our humanity. And to be fair, Clines does address this, and at times he does it well, but it feels like an afterthought for the most part, and just an excuse to lend a story some weight that’s really just fixated on how hard a super strong guy can punch a zombie.

Overall this is an enjoyable, if kind forgettable, read. It’s apparently the first book in a series, and I liked it enough where I will probably read the next book when it comes out.

Buy this book!