Perhaps we don’t actually need a new angle. Perhaps we just need to accept that the old angles work very well, and that’s why superhero tales endure. Certainly that’s what Stefan Mohamed’s novel Bitter Sixteen does; it accepts that we live in that world of stories, and posits that everything that happens if a person was to develop super powers would be heavily influenced by all the films and books and comics that have gone before. There’s a pecking order of superheroes, and the temptation would be to try to work out where that person stands. If this is beginning to sound a bit paint-by-numbers, then yes, that’s true. The plot wouldn’t offer anything surprising to anybody who has sat through a Marvel film recently, but, hey, it works for Marvel and it works here. Plus there are some really great benefits for the superhero lover in Bitter Sixteen and they are, in classic list form:

  1. The fact that it knows exactly what it is and doesn’t try to be anything else.
  2. Stanly owns a talking beagle called Daryl. Okay, I’ll go into slightly more detail about the talking beagle. He is brilliant. He reminded me at times of Marvin the Paranoid Android, but he’s not so much depressed as out of everybody else’s league. He makes very pithy asides, and watches a lot of films. He gets the reader through the first section of the book before the move to London by being incredibly entertaining. I’m a big fan of dogs in books, and Daryl certainly ranks very highly for managing to stay recognisably doglike even when quoting lines from Dogma. (Naturally.) One final thought – Bitter Sixteen sounds like a title for a book that raises deep issues about teenagers, and that is very, very far from what you get here. The blurb on the back of the book states that this is the first of a trilogy, and maybe the choice of title will become clear later on, but I do think that at the moment (and when twinned with a very dark and brooding cover) the title doesn’t do it any favours. Still, it’s definitely worth not judging this book by those criteria. If you know your Calrissian from your Kobayashi then this book is the most fun its possible to have in the superhero genre. It’s not new, but it really, really works. Author Stefan Mohamed is an occasional contributor to Den Of Geek. You can read his non-fiction work for the site, here. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.