I tend to read about 50-60 books a year and I try to be selective about what I read so I rarely end up thinking “wow, what a piece of crap that book was.” Even rarer are the times when I start a book and abandon it halfway through. But superhero short story anthology Who Can Save Us Now? is one of those books.
One reviewer at Amazon described the book as having “nothing what so ever to do with the superhero genre. It is instead a book filled with pretentious angst laden emo stories.” After getting halfway through the book before chucking it across the room, I’d say that’s giving it far more credit than it deserves. With one or two exceptions, all of the stories in the 200+ pages I managed to slog through were poorly written and largely pointless.
I kept forcing myself to read through one awful story after another hoping there would be some gem or decent story in there at some point, but no. The book reads like some introductory creative writing class was assigned to write about superheroes, and their instructor decided to take their unedited first drafts and publish them straight away as this book.
It’s that bad.