Review: Becoming Glitch

Becoming Glitch by Daniel Sayre
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A strong debut for this author, a superhero novel with heart and some depth to it. While it does go dark in places, it's not relentlessly so, and it pulls off the difficult feat of taking a slacker character (cruising by on his intelligence at a college that's not challenging him, while spending much of his time playing computer games and eating microwave meals) and turning him into a hero. We see, from inside the young man known to his friends as Andy and for superhero purposes as Glitch, his growth in courage and effectiveness, and how his friendships with a gruff ex-Marine, a perky, optimistic highschooler, an idealistic and poised immigrant, and a self-doubting man looking for somewhere to belong change him and help him to become more than he was. The title is well chosen; this is a coming-of-age story, but one that's better executed and less cliched than most. It involves no romance, which I think was a good choice on the author's part. Instead, the relationships that matter are friendship, mentorship and team loyalty.

A slight weakness for me was that the city authorities were handled tropishly and also kept almost entirely offstage, as potential minor antagonists who never really materialized. Their incompetence and bad priorities have resulted in a crime-ridden city which also seems to have an unusual number of fires, and the vigilante hero team step in where the cops and firefighters are inadequate to rescue people. There's not much sociological or political insight into the situation on show, and depending on your perspective, that could be a missed opportunity or a well-calculated avoidance of a potential distraction from the central story, which is Andy's growth into his hero persona under pressure of the challenges posed by becoming involved in crime prevention, fire rescue, and eventually supervillains.

Although I got a review copy via Netgalley, the publication date indicates that it's already published, not a pre-publication version, so I will mention the editing. The author, in his acknowledgements, thanks his sister (also apparently an author) for help with copy editing and grammar lessons; apparently his sister does not know the very important and basic rule that you should always use a comma before or after a term of address, such as a name. It needs going over by a professional editor, mainly for that but also for a few other common problems, including words missing or inserted in sentences, apostrophes in the wrong places and the occasional homonym error. I will note at this point that, with few exceptions, superhero fiction tends to be poorly edited; I don't know why.

The state of the editing dragged it down one tier in my Best of the Year list, from Gold to Silver. But it's a promising start to what I hope will be a series, or at least a career.

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