Soon I will Be Invincible is a book written by a loser for losers. Perhaps I'm being slightly unfair but the guy on the back is aggressively bald, over-educated, a computer game designer and has written an over-angsty, over-affectionate novel about superheroes and supervillains. I'm not saying he's not somebody I would love to hang out with but then I'm not saying I'm anything other than a loser too.

I'm a fair-to-moderate reader of superhero comics but I'm no authority on the genre so what I'm about to posit could be either a) so obvious it's not worth stating or b) completely wrong but I do think there's been a bit of a change of focus. Back in the day, it seems to me that superheroes were deliberately presented as everyman figures, community-spirited boys-next-door who just so happened to get gifted with exceptional powers. They seemed to be saying: "This Peter Parker fellow, he could be you, you could be the superhero."

But, of course, moral values have shifted with time. We're no longer all about the wholesome friendly neighbourhood superhero, we want the dark and the driven and morally ambiguous. The people who read comics are, for the most part, people like me (weird, unpopular kids) and, here on either side of the millennium, superheroes - those gifted by pure chance or cruel circumstance to be more attractive, more powerful and more popular than, say, me - are beginning to look rather like the kids who laughed at me at school. Thus you start to pay more attention to the villains, initially just larger than life foils to set against the unyielding virtue of the superhero. But, unlike the hero, villains tends to be self-made men who have progressed down the long road to world domination by dint being more intelligent and more determined than everyone else around them. A familiar motif for weird unpopular kids, I'm sure. The superhero belongs to the realm of the blessed and the accepted. The villain is the perennial scorned and derided outsider. I could take over the world, you know. If I wanted to.

SIWBI takes place on an alternative earth that, although rife with aliens, fairies, superheroes and supervillains, future tech and magic, is recognisably our own. The first person narrative alternates between the point of view of Dr Impossible, brilliant scientist turned supervillain and Fatale, a newly created cyborg who has just been invited into The Champions, a famous group of superheroes, previously led by Dr Impossible's arch nemesis. The plot, such as it is, is typical superhero fare: Dr Impossible escapes from prison and hatches the usual supervillain scheme to knock the planet out of orbit and herald in a new ice-age. Meanwhile CoreFire, the leader of The Champions, has disappeared and the group must to struggle to re-form into an effective unit and deal with the events of their past. As is practically de rigueur these days in anything dealing with people with super powers, the self-consciously trite plotline and the comic book archetypes are there primarily to illuminate the recognisable human dimension to it all. Thus The Champions battle not only Dr Impossible but their own very human failings and, even as he flounces around in scarlet cape and helmet, Dr Impossible angsts over the whether "the smartest man in the world has done the smartest possible thing with his life." It's not exactly ground-breaking but it seems to work well enough and adds pathos to Dr Impossible's obsession with invincibility, not so much to protect him from those with superpowers but to protect him from the very ordinary world that has always excluded and derided him and never loses its power to hurt him.

There's a lot to like here, if you're into that kind of thing. The chapter titles are all stock phrases ("Foiled Again" etc.) and most of the secondary characters are nods to various comic book characters. In fact the whole style and approach of SIWBI is incredibly affectionate and genial, although I do have to wonder what it's doing presenting itself as literary fiction because I can't imagine you'll get it, or indeed see the point of it, unless you're also fond of and familiar with the genre to which it offers itself as an homage. And I know that Grossman wanted specifically to write a book but it seems a peculiar choice to me. His writing style is brisk and punchy, favouring a lot of dramatic statements that would look absolutely perfect floating above a character's head in a speech bubble ("It was time for me to stop punishing myself and start punishing everyone else") but when they're just a just a line on a page they occasionally fall somewhat flat. It's kind of the equivalent of writing POW just like that. In fact, the blatant attempt to "literary-ise" the book, and through association the genre, is one of the more irritating features SIWBI. You like comics, dude, just accept it. Some people will laugh at you, some people will agree, and some people will start to talk about Maus. Regardless, Watchman will never be Ulysses.

As well as occasional stylistic difficulties the narrative jumps between the present and the past in a rather jarring manner. Although it's interesting to get (some of) the backstory, it does completely ruin the pace to the extent that what ought to be an adrenaline-saturated rush towards the final stages of Dr Impossible's plan bog down in a lot of superhero dithering and bickering. For the most part, Grossman is at his best in his supervillain's head. The attempt to give Dr Impossible a reasonably credible psychology for behaving as supervillains behave within the genre (always explaining his plans to the good guys, shrieking I AM A GENIUS at every slight provocation and so forth) does not entirely work because if you were actually capable of such self-awareness one would hope you would also be capable of behaving in a moderately sensible fashion. Nevertheless, Dr Impossible's seemingly unflinching commitment to a role he knows must always be the losing one does generate a certain emotional resonance and bizarrely, as the novel stutters to his inevitable defeat, a certain tragic force.

Dr Impossible, painted with all the narrative garishness a supervillain deserves, is not a subtle character:

For a second I stand at the fulcrum point of creation. God, I'm so unhappy.

But he is complex. Grossman writes him with genuine flair and appreciation. And, one loser to another, it's impossible not to empathise with his broken and lonely desperation:

If you're different you always know it and you can't fix it even if you want. What do you do when you find out your heart is the wrong kind? You take what you're given and be the hero you can be. Hero to your own cold, inverted heart.

Villain he may be but he's probably the arrogant, articulate poster boy for every geeky comic lover out there.

Sadly, the other characters can in no way live up to him, so much so they seem almost like afterthoughts. The Champions bitch and moan like a bunch of sulky teenagers and, even if that was partly the point, it didn't make them easy or pleasant to read about. As for Fatale, new superhero on the block, who narrates with Dr Impossible, she's tedious beyond expression. I had a feeling that, as a woman, she was probably meant to be saying profound things to me but her narrative voice is pedestrian at best and offers none of the exuberance or emotional engagement of Dr Impossible's. I skimmed most of the superhero sections.

Even so, Dr Impossible is worth the price of admission alone. If you're even remotely interested in the superhero genre or have ever contemplated world domination while sitting by yourself in maths, you'll probably find something to enjoy here.

PS - Please note the views expressed within the article are solely those of the author. Ferretbrain as a whole does not believe Mr Grossman is a loser.