Those Who Walk in Darkness
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
John Ridley, author of Love is a Racket, delivers an action-filled novel about a female cop facing off against strangely powerful enemies in a near-future Los Angeles.
In the near future, the world has become home to certain people with amazing genetic structures—giving them powers that make them frighteningly superior to normal humans. The Night Watchman was the first. Somewhere in San Francisco, he was out there—stopping a bank robbery, saving a kid from a runaway truck, whatever was needed. More “superheroes” followed,
though nobody called them that—but then came the bad ones, those who took pleasure in using their powers for ill. In response came the M-Tac squads: cops specially trained to fight these super-lethal enemies. Not a typical comic book superhero novel, John Ridley introduces a brave new world of heroes and villains, and shows that there’s no such thing as a Good Guy or a Bad Guy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When a supervillain wastes San Francisco in this high-octane futuristic thriller from screenwriter Ridley (The Drift), the U.S. decides to expel all "metanormals" within its borders. Those who choose to remain are hunted down by MTacs, police units who only have one job kill the freaks. It isn't a terribly original premise Batman fans will recognize the influence of Frank Miller's seminal graphic novel, The Dark Knight Returns but that's fine, because a premise is all it is, and Ridley knows it. Soledad O'Roark, a 26-year-old MTac and an engineering genius, has a virulent hatred of metanormals. Her tale is one of unremitting darkness, and from early on it's easy to tell it won't have a happy ending. For all the bleakness, though, Ridley makes it hard not to pull for Soledad. Readers will find themselves torn between sympathy, empathy, pity and disgust, often on the same page. With its lavish fight scenes, the book was clearly written with an eye on film adaptation. Yet Ridley, whose Hollywood credits include work on Three Kings and Undercover Brother, knows how to make his story work both as a novel and as a proto-screenplay. And as a novel, it works very well indeed.
