Comic books are always full of humans with extra ordinary powers running around saving the day and being the heroes. "Those Who Walk In Darkness" takes those same super heroes and tells us a story about what would happen if things went horribly wrong, a story about the very people the heroes were trying to protect turning on them and hunting them down.
The most interesting and simultaneously most difficult thing about reading this book is certainly the point of view that it's told from. While not immediately evident at the start, towards the middle of the book it seems that the story is being told from the point of view of the villain. The main character's rash actions, cold heartedness and general inhumanness are defiantly traits that make her less appealing to the reader. By the novel's end, I found myself wishing the main character would get hit by a bus.
The Antagonists (the super heroes), seem far more appealing to the reader even if they are being hunted down and occasionally being not the nicest of people themselves. This is of course one of the difficulties in writing when one switches around the antagonist/protagonist roles and in "Those Who Walk in Darkness," it does unfortunately make the book a little harder to read. However the very fact that the main character got underneath my skin kept me turning the pages.
Somehow Ridely breathes a fresh approach into this classic comic book theme (X-Men and X-2: heroes deemed freaks and hunted by society). Though Ridely's prose seems at times flat and predictable, he manages to stir some meaningful discourse on genetics and racism into the mix adding dimensionality, deepening the characterization, and enervating the story's plot.
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