Prototype - Brian Hodge.epub

This sixth novel from underappreciated horror writer Brian Hodge uses the premise of a superstrong, superviolent loner with a chromosome anomaly to ask how Nietzsche's Übermensch might fare in pre-apocalyptic America. The story's central irony is that the hero is oddly powerless: he has an artist's temperament--his few friends are reclusive underground artists--and is deeply self-doubting. He longs to know his nature and purpose as a monster, so he turns first to psychotherapy and hypnosis, then to a search for others of his kind. His companions in this quest are a bisexual psychologist and her female lover (a cultural anthropologist studying "contemporary tribes of discontent and disillusion"). The plot is a bit thin, but the imagery and ideas are intriguing--albeit self-consciously postmodern--and the characters are eerily convincing as outsiders to a society they condemn for its "rule by the mediocre."