Mark Barlow

I’ve been a fan James Maxey for a while now and this remained the only book that I hadn’t read, his earliest book. It does show that it’s his first published novel, or at least shows how much he has improved as a writer since.
It tells the story of man who wakes up one day to find he is sleeping in a house belonging to a strange couple, except he’s not really in a strange house, it is his house. At first he assumes he is dead and that all of this has gone on a month after but everything shows that it isn’t the case. It turns out that he never existed at all, due to a man scientist who has changed the past and, in so doing, altered the present.
The book proposes to be set within a reality version of our world if things like superheroes were real but in all honesty it is no different from any comic book that you can pick up, just in a novel form. I like my superheroes and Maxey comes up with some neat concepts and his heroes are suitably hero-like without going over-the-top or making his story too childlike–this is for adults–but I couldn’t help think that there was something missing, something tangible to make it special, that something that all his later books had that made them so memorable and stylish. This book was entertaining and I enjoyed it but just a few days after I had finished it I can’t even remember the main character’s name, the Nobody of the title. The characters just don’t have the quality that makes them stick in the mind that his other characters, like Bitterwood, had and I think it all has to do with Maxey being a young writer with much to learn, which he obviously did.
I enjoyed it and it’s certainly worth a read but if you’re new to Maxey you should probably pick the Bitterwood trilogy or his short story collection There is No Wheel.