Book review
Written by Andy Briggs
Oxford University Press paperback
Release date Out now

An unusual pair of websites grant superpowers – but what will the recipients do with them?

Although there are common occurrences in both books, the first two novels in Andy Briggs's interlinked series are very different in feel.

Hero.com treads some quite familiar ground: a group of young people acquire superpowers, find themselves battling a supervillain, then have to save the world. The novelty comes in the way they get their powers, and there are some nice nods to the oddities of the internet along the way.

There's the usual amount of waffle about power giving responsibility, and the temptations that have to be overcome if you had such powers. The problem is that no one has really done that better than Stan Lee did in Amazing Fantasy #15 way back in 1962 when he introduced Spider-Man to an unsuspecting Marvel readership, and it doesn't help that many of the powers that Briggs gives his heroes match the early Marvel heroes such as the Fantastic Four and Spidey himself.

Villain.net is far more concerned with the backstory to the whole set up, and although you find yourself wishing that the central character, Jake Hunter, would be an out-and-out villain, the twists in the story make this the more intriguing of the two books. Certain plotlines and characters from Hero.Com appear in the second book, explaining some slightly odd choices made in the first story, and you look at one particular "hero" in a very different light after reading Villain.net.

Aimed at a young adult audience, both stories suffer at times from arch dialogue ("You risk wiping out life as we know it and therefore your own allies!") and clichéd writing. Paul Simpson

VERDICT
Hero.com: 6/10
Villain.net: 7/10
If the more morally shaded tone of Villain.net is repeated in the next books in each series, Briggs could be onto a winner.