Thursday, August 07, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Books: Superfreak

By John Ziebell

If anyone could imagine applying the phrase "Renaissance man" to the sprawling media enterprise that is Los Angeles, then John Ridley--writer, producer, director, NPR commentator and more--would be a favorite to fit the job description.

Ridley is smart, wildly prolific and inside all the loops that matter. He certainly knows what an audience wants, almost any audience; his writing credits include Conversations with the Mann and four other novels, along with films as diverse as U-Turn, Three Kings and Undercover Brother.

With the scope Ridley has exhibited in the past, it isn't really surprising that the first pages of his latest book follow the rollout of an MTac team, an elite, near-future band of LAPD supercops. After all, everybody knows that cops sell, especially to the movies. But it is a surprise to discover what the cops are after: superheroes. Of the comic book variety. Metanormals, or muties, in the more discriminatory vernacular. These are pulp villains--fireball-spewing pyrokinetics, hyperkinetics who can move faster than bullets, mind-controlling telepaths--but pulp villains gone amok, maniacally taking lives by the busloads.

The history of the world according to Ridley goes something like this. Once upon a time, because of some unspecified evolutionary recombination process, people started developing abnormal powers. In the near future--like next week--the small percentage of metanormals began to make their powers known. At first, their superhuman displays were mainly about averting disaster in the nick of time--real Superman stuff. But as more metanormals came out of the woodwork, the dark side got its own mutie representation. Soon there were bad muties as well, challenged by those who stood for right and justice, etc. They had nicknames and costumes and the whole nine yards. And there they were, like graphic novels come to life, until they started taking human lives.

When good superheroes go bad, they deserve a special kind of vengeance, and no thinking person should be surprised by the levels of homicidal rage that we humanoids are capable of. The original muties--or "freaks," as they were quickly renamed in copspeak--were perfect targets. Good, bad or neutral, they were different, and they were going down. The muties went underground, of course, assumed defensive postures while trying to "pass" for normal. When Soledad O'Roarke, the heroine of this amped-up tale, suits up for her first MTac callout, the LAPD has freak-hunting down to a science. Unfortunately for MTac officers, however, that science is mutable. Freaks would not be freaks if they didn't have some surprises left, after all.

Hunting bad guys with superhuman powers takes a special kind of person, a BAMF. (Right, it's an L.A. cop acronym, see how many guesses it takes to figure it out.) Muties can turn metal walls into edged weapons, can telepathically convince cops to shoot each other, can throw flame from their fingertips or turn a junkyard into an army of lethal missiles. Soledad is tough and smart and has focused a lifetime's worth of animosity into being the best freak-killer she can be, but sometimes even she comes up short, and of course that's before she shoots down the winged wife of the meanest metanormal in the greater SoCal neighborhood. Not to mention that she's dealing with some issues that are less than meta in scale, like the weird new guy in her life and the conspiracy among an old-boy LAPD network to shaft her in a few fiendishly clever ways.

Sure, this is a book that demands the suspension of some disbelief, but no more than any blockbuster in the theaters right now. And that doesn't mean it's bad, either. Ridley is an extremely competent writer, a journeyman capable of turning eloquent phrases with the best of them, and even in this vaguely futuristic vehicle his cultural commentary on L.A. is ironic and unimpeachable. The world we're given is gritty enough to feel real, and the characters are drawn solidly enough to anchor the plot to the pages. The only heavy-handed moments come in the frequent digressions about the nature of "otherness"--gee, isn't hating someone for her superpowers like hating someone for the color of her skin or the church she goes to?--but we certainly should be able to live with those.