Prepare to Die!

by Paul Tobin

Nine years ago, Steve Clarke was just a teenage boy in love with the girl of his dreams. Then a freak chemical spill transformed him into Reaver, the man whose super-powerful fists can literally take a year off a bad guy's life.

Days ago, he found himself at the mercy of his arch-nemesis Octagon and a whole crew of fiendish super-villains, who gave him two weeks to settle his affairs--and prepare to die.

Now, after years of extraordinary adventures and crushing tragedies, the world's greatest hero is returning to where it all began in search of the boy he once was . . . and the girl he never forgot.

Exciting, scandalous, and ultimately moving, Prepare to Die! is a unique new look at the last days of a legend.

Genres: Superheroes, Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction, Audiobook, Paranormal, Mystery

350 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2012

About the author

Paul Tobin is the Eisner-award winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Bandette, Colder, and many other comic books and graphic series.

Bandette, drawn by Colleen Coover, was awarded the Eisner Award for Best Digital Series in 2013, 2016, and 2017; and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award for Graphic Literature in 2016. His original graphic novel I Was the Cat was nominated for an Eisner in 2015.

The Genius Factor: How to Capture an Invisible Cat , first in his five-book series of middle-grade books, came out in 2016 from Bloomsbury Kids. It was followed in 2017 by How To Outsmart A billion Robot Bees , and How To Tame A Human Tornado in March 2018.

Reviews

[TheBookSmugglers · Rating 1 out of 5]

Originally reviewed at Kirkus

I admit I have a fascination for stories about superhumans and I’m always on the lookout for new novels featuring super-powered characters. This fascination stems from all the potential inherent in such stories, from examining the roles super-powered people might play in human society to the effect that super-powers can have on one’s psyche—a great example of the latter is the ongoing Extrahuman Series by Susan Jane Bigelow. Of course, navigating this subgenre of SFF can be a minefield; often, the bad (and the ugly) stories overpower the good ones.

Case in point... Prepare to Die! by veteran comics writer Paul Tobin.

Steve Clarke AKA the Reaver is one of the world’s greatest superheroes. As the story opens, Steve has lost a fight against his nemesis and is given two weeks to prepare for death. He returns home to win back the girl of his dreams and childhood sweetheart, Adele, whom he has not seen in a decade—ever since he became a superhero after The Accident.

Prepare to Die! features everything that can possibly go wrong in superhuman fiction: ridiculous clichés, the objectification of female characters, a juvenile obsession with sex and the glorification of the male gaze. It is also badly written with terrible, stilted dialogue, liberal info-dumping and mind-numbing repetition. The fact that Steve can do stuff three times faster than the regular person was mentioned every three pages or so.

As the hero prepares to die, readers are rewarded with several chapters of exposition as he describes the origin stories of all superheroes and supervillains in this universe. Steve also regales us with the amazing story of how he goes off to save the world multiple times and his ensuing sexual exploits: he has bedded models, Oscar winners, heroines and villainesses alike. And the girl he left behind? The greatest love of his life? Has remained celibate, incapable of experiencing good sex. And completely obsessed with hero, to the point of becoming a writer so she can write several books about him.

But that’s not the extent of the book’s childish, abhorrent treatment of its female characters. For example, take the two main female supervillains. One of them fights naked, the other has, literally, the power of sex. There is also a promiscuous lesbian character that—randomly—walks into scenes, topless.

I am not making this up. And I can hardly believe someone has actually made this shit up in the year 2012.

I mean, in retrospect I should have known. On page ONE, the hero describes a woman whose life he is about to save as she is been beaten to death by a criminal: “Too overweight to be considered as pretty.”

At such an early point in the story, I had hoped that this was one of those books in which the main character’s abhorrent sexism would be the author’s platform to offer clever social commentary on how sexism is harmful. But alas, no. There is no clever commentary here; Prepare to Die! only offers the unchecked glorification of an idiotic character in a world where women exist solely as objects of desire and/or function as cheerleaders for the male protagonist. Even the one female character who is nearly invincible and whose power makes her literally the smartest person on the planet comes up with a plan in which this hero saves the world and becomes the face of superheroism. Because apparently not even the most intelligent and invincible woman on the planet could possibly come up with a plan in which a girl (such as herself) becomes the face of superheroism.

There is absolutely nothing here to make me recommend this book. In Book Smugglerish: 1 out 10.

RUN! Run three times faster than the normal human away from this book!

[William Thomas · Rating 1 out of 5]

Note: This is not a comic book or a graphic novel.

I've been reading comics since I was 8 years old, so that's a 22 year love affair with America's greatest art form. (Sorry jazz). In that time, I've heard all of the intellectual, faux-intellectual and unintelligible arguments surrounding the medium. I think in the last 15 years, we've won the war against the intelligentsia who claim comics are lowest common denominator. Books like Maus, Sandman, Love and Rockets, The Invisibles, Strangers in Paradise, Watchmen, etc have shown that the medium is to be considered both art and literature. Having said that, there are two arguments we won't ever be done with- the pervasive violence and the objectification of women in comics. Don't worry, I'm nt going to turn this into a debate on those subjects. I stand firm with the more violence, the better. I stand against the objectification. Fairly simple reasoning there. My fear, which is realized here in Tobin's 'Prepare to Die!', is that comic books will once again become an object of scorn and ridicule for their obscenity and sophomoric world view.

Paul Tobin is a writer without merit or talent. He is completely without humor. The man is a hack. If this was supposed to be a satire or parody of the super-hero genre, it fails miserably. Tobin tries for an off-hand and sarcastic tone, but it falls flat and comes off as too cynical and at times, downright mean-spirited. I mean, from the first page the main character makes a comment abut a girl who is too fat to be pretty. Ok. I'm not sure how necessary that was. And it felt more like Tobin saying something he thinks all the time, but isn't allowed to ever say. It feels evil. Mean. Not even cynical or sarcastic. Not like he's trying to lampoon American values of beauty, but just being nasty and bitter.

So right from page one, the reader gets tossed rigiht back into the misogyny debate and we get our first taste of the objectification that is so pervasive in this novel.

Basically the entire book revolves around the fact that Reaver wants to reconnect with a girl from his hometown that he hasn't seen or contacted in 10 or so years. And by reconnect I mean bang. The premise that Reaver wants to get all of his affairs in order before Octagon kills him really just means he wants to have it off with a high school girlfriend before he bites the dust. So we are subjected to flashbacks of dates and really juvenile romanticism. In real time we get a lesbian running around topless all the time like that's a lesbian's natural state. The female villains powers all revolve around manipulation of men's minds or body chemistry, and the main character has had his way with more than one of them.

I'm not a prude. I like sex, gratuitous nudity, and more sex. It's just that this all had a very bitter taste. Like a hate-f@#$. It seemed like it came from a place of rage, scorn and anger. Normally, that might lend it some poetry, but here it felt petty and juvenile. This whole book seemed like a high school writing project.

Aside from all the terrible sex fantasies and stalking, the writing iis just genuinely terrible. I couldn't count how many times he mentioned his hometown. It seemed like it was at the end of every sentence for more than half the book. I wish I had the damn thing in front of me so I could pull a few more examples out of it, but I gave it back, happily, to the library.

I know that it says right on the front cover that it's a novel of sex and superheroes, but this was just ludicrous. After this, I'll never read one of his comics. I might have more to say about this but I just cannot be bothered.

[Rose]

I usually try to make it more then a chapter and a half before giving up on a book -- particularly a book about superheroes, particularly a book about a superhero with such an inventive superpower. (Get hit by the Reaver, and you lose one year off your life.) But, despite the fact that author Paul Tobin has written GNs before, this is Tobin's first prose novel, and he breaks several rules: no info-dumping, no having your first-person narrator describe himself because he's looking in a mirror, pick up the pace, etc.

I might have been able to forgive a few writing flaws (it *is* a first novel) because there were other questions -- what exactly happened to his pal Paladin, for instance -- that I wanted answered. But I could not get past the second hurdle of this book, which was the female characters. I know this is a first-person novel, so Tobin is simply letting his main character *be* who his main character is -- but I don't want to spend 350 pages with a main character who sees all women through the lens of sex. I just don't.

I read books to relate to the main characters, to be interested in them and touched by them and inspired by them. They do not have to be perfect or flawless in order to achieve this. (In fact, a perfect, flawless character would not be interesting and inspiring, because they'd be flat and fake and boring.) But it would be nice if the main character A.) views their fellow human beings as _actual_ human beings -- OR, failing that, B.) gets called out for their failure. Not only does Reaver see all women through the lens of sex, but my impression is that there will be no female character to challenge that perspective, in any way. The women in this story have been and will be props. ALL of them.

Hard to want to spend time with a character who sees my gender as less-than-human. Hard to be a superhero with that mindset, too, if you ask me -- even if you are meant to be a flawed, post-modern sort of one. Sorry, Mr. Tobin -- I'm out.

[Rachael]

I just started this book, but I already have some issues with it. I want to be very clear, I LOVE what I've read of Paul Tobin's comics (Marvel Adventures, Spider-Girl) and the books he's done with Colleen Coover (Gingerbread Girl, Banana Sunday). The characters are dynamic and the action is zippy and fun. So I was really looking forward to this novel to get a sense of what Paul Tobin can write for adults.

On the very first page, he alienated me with the following description of a woman as "too overweight to be considered as pretty." Well gosh, Paul Tobin, I'm fat, and I'm pretty. I know a lot of fat, pretty (or otherwise attractive) women (and men). Considering that the clinical definition of "overweight" is based on flawed standards like the Body Mass Index, I'm betting that you know many women who are technically "overweight" that you find pretty.

Just a few pages later, the hero makes the sweeping statement that "[m]ost men in prison are there because it's where they belong." I'm hoping that this is a sign of worldbuilding - that in the world of this novel, racist drug laws aren't a factor - but without a firm statement to support that fact, the hero seems to support the idea that 4.3% of black men, 1.8% of Latino men, and 0.7% of white men in this country deserve to be in prison.

Readers may also note the protagonist's casual attitude toward consent (acknowledging that he should have allowed his ex-girlfriend the chance to decline his visit) and troubling desire to inspire fear in his sexual partners (and the assumption that "most people" enjoy that).

All of the scenes above occur within the first chapter, which is 16 pages long. My (straight, white, cis male) partner said the scene that stopped him from reading is on page 22. So I'm having a really hard time wanting to continue with this book.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Women in this universe are motivated primarily by sex. Sure, you expect that from Laura, the sexy horny promiscuous frequently topless lesbian (and yes, that's an ACTUAL character), but every female character is just biding her time until she can make herself sexually available to the hero, or at least tease him a little. So that's obnoxious.

The concept was intriguing to me, but the execution lacked. Frequent flashbacks can work, but they need to be more skillfully managed than they are here. And holding certain information (like Tom's fate) until nearly the end didn't pay off, because it's neither emotionally loaded nor significant enough to the plot. I came up with two or three more interesting options before the author got around to presenting his.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was so good, I read it 3x faster than a normal human being.

[AudioBookReviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

My full Prepare to Die review can be found at Audiobook Reviewer.

So within the first hour I was hooked and hate to admit this but there was a line that really rang true to me and, hopefully, many other guys.

"I allowed myself a shower piss, one of man's greatest pleasures, if women could see us pissing in the showers the way we're not bothered by it running down our legs, I'm not sure if they'd ever sleep with us again."

After that line I was all in and had to find out more about Reaver and the circumstances of his impending death or execution. Also this line really sets the tone for the rest of the audiobook. Reaver is an "invincible" hero, many would say that isn't true and that he simply heals extremely fast, who has met his match. All of the other "good" supers have been killed off by the "bad" supers and he is the last one, a very heavy weight to carry. Finding himself caught by his nemesis Octagon, as a gun was being held to Reaver he was told "Prepare to Die", with the great response of "How long do I have?" Ultimately settling on two weeks before Reaver has to submit to execution he finds it necessary to finally do somethings he has been meaning to do yet couldn't find the time, being needed to save the population all the time. Prepare to Die was a very dark, gritty and melancholy story, defiantly not for the those who are looking for a PG Superman vs. Lex Luthor, please look elsewhere, as this audiobook is full of foul language, sexual situation and stories, love and loss, brutal graphic gore and violence. With much of the story telling back story of how Reaver became a super and what he has done with his power and the internal struggle of doing what he wants or doing the hero thing torments him to no end, almost to the point where I wanted to grab Reaver and shake and slap him to stop whining. Paul Tobin was able to create relatable characters that brought the heroes down to earth ans human beings that are full of their own issues that when left undealt with, starts to eat them up inside until they can find closure. With a few plot twists and turns I was left smiling in my cubicle while the end credits were being read and thinking to myself how much Reaver was like me and how I have to tell and show my wife how much I truly love her.

Audiobook provided for review by Audible.

[Cathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. Unlike most people, I always thought that being a superhero would be a horrible job. Who wants to fight all of the time and be a target all of the time? So that perspective naturally fed into the approach this author took to projecting a (somewhat) realistic idea of what being a hero would really mean, with a lot of sad and dirty details in the mix. When we meet our hero he's done, beaten, worn down and just done with it all, and then we get to go back and try to figure out how he got to that point. The hero never really matured beyond the point of the sixteen year-old boy that he was at the time of the accident that made him a hero, so there's a lot of crude sexual content that makes the book not for the faint on heart. But it seemed to suit the character, who was swept out of his normal life when he was just a kid, and is still pretty young at only twenty-five at the end of the story. 

I found the book to be a great page-turner, I just always wanted to find out what was going to happen/had happened to this kid. It fit into the comic book mythos in a grown-up fashion.

[Trike · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 out 5 punches to the face.

I started this yesterday afternoon and finished it today. That in itself is a recommendation.

This book isn't brilliant but it *is* really fucking good. You can think of it like a Marvel Max with the adult themes and sex talk and Rated-M-for-Mature attitude. It's definitely lewd and crude, but Tobin doesn't do it to be shocking; rather, it's just the way some of these characters behave. I do wonder if some people might see some misogyny in parts of the book, but the reality is that both genders are treated equally: good sides and bad.

The fight scenes are brutally satisfying, and there is a definite moral ambiguity to much of the interaction between heroes and villains. Especially when some of them switch sides. One of the unintended consequences with the Comics Code Authority was that heroes weren't allowed to kill, but villains often were. This raises the question of moral absolutes versus situational ethics because, in the final measure, wouldn't the world be better off if Batman just killed Joker outright? In comics which examine the complexities of the world, we've seen that when moral absolutes and situational ethics collide, the outcome isn't always predictable. When the Kingpin is killed, it creates an anarchic vacuum that was far worse than what Spider-man and Daredevil faced when foiling Kingpin's plans.

Prepare to Die examines that same gray area of superheroing. Plus dollops of regret about the choices we all make as we get older. Those choice may have been right in the moment, but from another viewpoint sometimes they aren't the best path to follow. Problem is, you don't know until afterward.

All this, plus epic battles. What's not to like?

I really enjoyed the tone of the book, I liked the pacing, I liked the inventiveness of it and, ultimately, the preoccupation with sex didn't annoy me as much as it does in other books.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This could have been great; instead it was uneven, occasionally good, sometimes ho-hum, often a bit annoying.

The pluses:
The plotting
The realistic-but-not-nihilistic tone
The fight scenes

The minuses:
The sexism
The pacing
The flashbacks, interrupting events just as they get interesting
The typos
The sexism
The continuity errors (on one page, someone who's been dead for 12 years is referred to as dead for 9 years, and on another the author says "Adele" when he means "Apple")
The language--not the profanity, but the author's clumsiness with both words and sentence structure
The sexism
The sexism

[Ken · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh, man, this was not the book for me. Much of the book is told in author's summary, so there's very little sense of immediacy. It's also almost entirely lacking in suspense, tension, drama, almost any sort of emotion, really, aside from a vague sort of humor. There are so many digressions and back stories that I really found it very distracting and frustrating. And I really tired of all the allusions to how many people the main character had had sex with. For a book brimming with boners and braggadocio, it was ultimately, well, limp.

At least the half that I read. Perhaps the second 50% improved markedly. I will never know.

[Dr. T Loves Books · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a comic book fan, so I had to check this one out. It was entertaining. I liked the idea that a) being a hero might not be all it's cracked up to be, b) a hero who knew he was going to die might change his behavior and try to wrap-up his "business". It's an interesting idea. Granted, some of the characters are a bit lacking in dimension, but then again, it's basically a comic book.

[Colleen Coover · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disclaimer: This book was written by my husband.

[Huss]

wikid awsome

[Tim Hulsizer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm always excited to read novels about superheroes. Much as I love comic books themselves, there's something interesting about reading their stories stripped from the visual aid of the artwork. Without the visuals, and with more time to ramble in prose form, an author can get inside a hero's head in a way that few comic books or graphic novels are able to manage.

One of my favorite superhero novels, All My Friends Are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman, manages to bridge the gap between normal human being and superhuman by telling the story of a marriage in which the protagonist becomes invisible only to his wife. As the book progresses he tries to reunite with his love while mentioning their superhero friends who happen to have powers very familiar to the average person, like The Perfectionist and Mistress Cleanasyougo.

Another favorite, Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman, is more in line with traditional superhero comic books but throws in a dash of extra realism as we read about the nefarious Doctor Impossible and his plan to throw the planet out of its orbit. Can rookie superheroine Fatale save the world with the team known as The Champions?

Prepare To Die by Paul Tobin is its own kettle of fish. Sub-billing itself as "A novel of superheroes, sex, and secret origins," it certainly isn't lying about what you get inside, but I couldn't help feeling annoyed and frustrated at the book for coming across so sexist. I'm not going to throw the word misogyny around here. There are plenty of female characters and I don't think he hates women, but so few of the women in the book seem relatable and they're all sexualized to cartoonish levels. I was drawn to the book in the first place because of interview quotes like this:

"I’d been writing comics for a few years, working at that time primarily for Marvel Comics, and there were so many rules and regulations about how to do this and how to do that, and the main emphasis was on fighting, on balls-out action, and I just wanted to do something different. It’s not that I had any particular problem with the “Marvel” way or the comics I was writing, I just wanted to expand the stories I could tell… delve more into the human side of the characters, what it’s like to be superhuman, and the incredible mental and physical drain of being any type of hero. And I wanted to be able to deal with such adult topics as sexuality in a more rational manner. That’s one area where I don’t feel comics as a whole do a very good job: sexuality is portrayed as a sideline or a titillation, rather than a normal part of everyday life. It has the unfortunate side effect of turning too many characters into giggling teenagers whose entire knowledge of sex comes from internet porn and schoolyard jokes. Comics can often deal with relationships in a similar throw-away manner. Don’t get me wrong, there are many comics that deal with these topics in ways that truly resonate as great literature, but I wanted to tell my own stories in my own way. "

That all sounds great! I agree, sexuality in comics isn't explored properly, and when Tobin mentioned that some of his influences are things like Love and Rockets and books by Chris Ware, I ran to the local bookshop and ordered his novel. But right from the first page I was let down. Every time a woman is introduced to the story, she's either horny as hell or the book has to talk about her looks. I could go on like this, but instead of generalizing, I'll just lay out some of the instances that bugged me.

On the first page we meet Steve, a/k/a the superhero named Reaver. He's stopped at a gas station that just happens to get robbed, and we're treated to a description of the first woman in the book: "The screams were coming from a blonde, too overweight to be considered as pretty..." Come on, man. I know plenty of people who are overweight and pretty.

The book is written in the first person so the author gets to write off every instance of this kind of thing by saying "Hey, it's Steve talking about these women, not me!" But I'm not inclined to let Tobin off that easily, not when he talked so much in interviews about addressing sexuality and heroes in a serious way. Why is it wrong for me to expect more from a book than to jump out of the gate with a "No Fat Chicks" bumper sticker mentality? Do you want the reader to engage with your protagonist or not? I get that this is meant to be a flawed, confused sort of antihero but my interest was so deflated by that description of the woman that I almost quit the book immediately. I can't imagine the author intended that response, and I don't think I'm being overly sensitive about the issue.

The battle with the gas station robbers begins and we learn that Steve's driving back to his hometown to see his teenage love Adele. He mentions taking a shower on the trip and muses: "If women could see us pissing in the showers, the way we're not bothered by it running down our legs, I'm not sure they'd ever sleep with us again." First of all, there are women who piss in the shower, don't fool yourself. Secondly, the fear isn't that women wouldn't speak to men, it's that "they'd never sleep with us". Because "women" = "sex" in this book? I know I'm starting to flog a dead horse at this point but the interviews led me to expect more.

Reaver is heading back home to settle some loose ends, it turns out, because a bunch of bad guys beat him in battle and told him "Prepare to die." He asked their leader Octagon for a little time to do so and they gave him two weeks. Throughout the trip home Reaver reminisces about how he became the man he is today (chemical waste) and how it affected himself and those around him. It's these parts where the book shines, because it gets into some heavy stuff involving Steve's older brother and their friend Paladin who were both involved in the incident that gave Reaver his powers. But every time I was getting into that stuff, the book threw in some off-handed mention of women in such a careless way that I got annoyed all over again.

Pg.21: A description of how a local cabin in Reaver's hometown has women's names carved into a rafter. These women are part of the "local custom of girls getting finger-banged as their first sexual experience." Why does sex happen TO women and not WITH them? Why are men reduced to conquerors here? Yes, I went to high school. Sex was on everyone's minds. But the entire male student body didn't band together to carve the names of their conquests into the ceiling of our downtown gazebo.

Pg.25: Our first meeting with Siren, a superheroine whose power is...wait for it...to inspire lust in men.

Pg34: In a flashback, the protagonist's brother has a girlfriend named Judy who's giving him a handjob in the front seat, because that's just something girls like to do when their boyfriend's little brother is in the back seat. When the protagonist in the back seat says his brother gets handjobs all the time from Judy, she declares, "It's not all the damn time! I'm not a whore! It's like...maybe twice a day!" I'm going to go out on a limb and say that nobody talks like this.

Pg.38: Another flashback scene takes place in a strip club. Of course it does.

Pg.40: The book discusses a group of women online who are attracted to a sadistic villain named Laser Beast. They are described as "goddamn crazy bitches." Because just calling them crazy wouldn't do?

Pg.69: In a flashback, the three boys get into trouble and a local cop picks them up. He plays a joke on them by pretending the police station wants to know what sexual experiences they've had with their girlfriends. He finally tells them it was a joke but let one of them off without the ribbing because, "I heard your girlfriend has got big titties, and even an officer of the law has to respect that." Okaayyy.

Pg.71: Still in the flashback, Steve heads over to his girlfriend's place late at night after getting into that trouble with friends at a sheep farm, trying to figure out how a hero named Warp got his powers when he worked there. Steve briefly wonders if he shouldn't bother Adele that late, smelling like sheep shit, but "didn't women like the smell of shit? Wasn't there something primal about it?" I'm just going to let the women weigh in on this one. What do you say, ladies? You love a nice whiff of feces?

Pg.73: This is where Steve "corrects" his previous statements about the girls whose names adorn that local cabin rafter: "It's a slap in the face that some people count a boy having sex as a triumph, and a girl having sex as a defeat. These girls on the list, they hadn't been defeated; they'd only lived life, and done so with pleasure." I'm not quite sure where to even start with this. Suffice to say that although I've met guys who focus on brief flings and don't treat women well, I've never encountered anyone who said, "Yo, I really defeated that girl last night!" I think there's just a basic problem with the writing. Sometimes it's like Steve got replaced with Alex Perchov, the English-mangling character from Everything Is Illuminated.

Pg.77: Reaver recalls a request to use his sperm from a "group of fifty-six (yes, fifty-six) Ukrainian lesbians who had formed a warrior cult and lived in caves." Is...is this a thing? I don't know, I'm not a lesbian, is this a real thing? Now I'm actually curious if this book knows something I don't about the Ukraine.

Pg. 85-86: Back in his hometown, Steve's old girlfriend Adele reveals that she's single and all these years she's been sitting around obsessing over him, even becoming an alcoholic while she pined away. Look, I know he's a superhero and that's cool, but he got superpowers and skipped town while they were in high school. My first love ditched me and I took it pretty hard, but after a couple years we all move on. That's just how it works. There's a thin line in a book between a star-crossed romance and a bizarre fixation that transcends the bounds of logic and believability.

Pg.88: Adele's little sister, a nymphomaniac lesbian (of course) runs downstairs topless and, excited to see Steve for the first time in years, embraces him. Oh, those forgetful lesbian sex maniacs.

Pg.90: A fight between Octagon and Reaver crashes through the glass door of an apartment where the occupants are naturally having a threesome. What is this, a 1980s Hollywood action movie? Die Hard and Commando both have scenes of people going into a room and they just happen to interrupt a man and topless woman in mid-coitus. I didn't buy it then either.

Pg.128: Reaver is following the trail of a bad guy and happens to land on a tree branch next to a window where a woman is "naked, reclining on a bean bag with her laptop computer recording a webcam show that involved her lower body, and her fingers, and three items normally considered as food." GODDAMN IT.

Pg.152: A description of Taffy, the superheroine with the stretchy-limb powers of Reed Richards from the Fantastic Four: "A lot has been said (in the press, and in myriad porno 'tribute' movies) that Taffy was the perfect woman with the way she could bend herself into any shape, twist and stretch herself even into another person, stretch her arms (or, as the porno films always highlighted, stretch whatever whatever) until they were five feet long, or fifty, or a hundred." The Perfect Woman...right.

Pg.180: Reaver is fighting a villain named Stellar who may in fact be an alien. She must be from a planet of horny nymphos because she strips down and says they should breed. He obliges because, err...that's what you do in a fight with a villain when you have a penis and they have a vagina? Or something? (I get it, he's a flawed man, thank you.)

Pg.221: There's a huge battle outside a supermarket with a villain named Tempest who lifts cars and people into the air and murders willy-nilly. As the battle subsides after Tempest's defeat, the terrified people look for survivors and phone their loved ones, with calls ending "with statements that could be translated as, 'You had better be ready for some rough sex, because I made it through this alive and my groin is going to prove it!' " I've watched footage of people who survived horrifying events like terrorist attacks. They looked haunted. They looked shattered. I may be wrong, but very few appeared horny.

Pg.234: Adele and Steve discuss their teen years again and how he left town shortly after being involved in the accident that left him with superpowers. His last time in town was in a coma at the hospital, just a few days after doing something involving "your hand, umm, in my panties." Since Steve wasn't in town anymore to do it himself, Adele took it upon herself to write her own name on the rafter for him. Romance! Oh, and while he was comatose at the hospital, she masturbated while visiting him. Double romance! And perfectly normal hospital behavior!

Pg.237: Adele wants to talk about sex,but yikes! "Girls are not supposed to bring up such topics." For fuck's sake. I'm too tired at this point to even point out how stupid that is. Oh wait, I just did.

Let's just bring this rundown to a close. I've complained enough. I will just add that after all of this stuff, all these illogical moments and frustrations, I reached the final showdown between Reaver and Octagon. And it was good. Like REALLY good. Things happen that are both surprising and exciting and finally give a hint at the talent Paul Tobin has in overall plotting, if not necessary in terms of dialogue. It was, in fact, such a cool idea for an ending that I was almost happy I slogged through the childish stuff. It was so good I was extra bugged that he'd dropped the ball on all of the "deal[ing] with such adult topics as sexuality in a more rational manner." Instead he let nipple-flicking and descriptions like "she even had some of her groin in her voice" get in the way.

So in the end, I have to wonder if we're dealing with just a flawed hero or a flawed author? I guess we'll have to wait for his next book to see what it brings. Until then, I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope for a better sophomore effort, and for someone to write my name on that holy rafter in the sex cabin of their heart.

[Nathan Woll · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great super hero story. The plot was fun and it definitely felt like reading a superhero movie.
However, the overall vibe of the book was weird. It felt like the author was desperately trying to pretend to be male. It made me feel like how I imagine most women feel when male authors try to inefficiently write female characters. In the first chapter the male narrator talks about peeing in the shower as if it's perfectly normal for men to do that. Why would anyone pee in the shower? That's absurd, showers are by design generally right next to functioning toilets.
Then there's the fascination with sex. I mean, I get it, men like sex, haha, stereotypes are funny. But it was just taken to such an extreme that it felt completely fake.
Strangely, it appears that the author is actually male which is just bizarre. It does explain why he also doesn't seem to understand how women work either. (One of the female characters walks around topless all the time in situations that are totally inconceivable)

[TK · Rating 4 out of 5]

While this book was at times rather crude and crude, and leaning hard on the "male power fantasy" concept, the drama was interesting, and it did feel very much like a gritty comic book novelized well. I enjoyed it. Particularly, I felt the backstory sequences were told well, interspersed with the events of present day which brought everything together in a way that made sense as Steve/Reaver opened up about the past and the traumatic events that acknowledged that while he was one of the "good guys" he wasn't exactly a good guy, and those mistakes had a cost.

I can see how many of the reviews are negative, given how hard this novel leans into the male gaze, conquest, heavy sexual innuendo throughout, coarse language, and the lead character is is rather crass. Also, the women in the novel are all very much in the vein of "written by a man" and definitely too fantasy to be believable in another format, but given the comic book nature of the source material, I didn't find it surprising or jarring.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Angst-ridden superheroes (and supervillains) are something of a thing, these days, and Prepare To Die is a perfectly adequate example of this burgeoning subgenre.

I'm a fan of this sort of thing anyway—other examples that spring easily to mind include Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible; the zany From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain by Minister Faust (and don't miss The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad); Emperor Mollusk versus The Sinister Brain by A. Lee Martinez; the super-criminally undersung Captain Freedom: A Superhero's Quest for Truth, Justice, and the Celebrity He So Richly Deserves by G. Xavier Robillard... and then of course there's a whole anthology of such fiction, Masked. Just to name a few.

The one that probably strikes closest to this current entry, though, is Carrie Vaughn's rather weepy After the Golden Age. As the reviewer in The Portland Mercury noted, the action-packed superpowered fight scenes in Prepare To Die are balanced by an equal (if not greater) amount of guilt, misery and introspection. That reviewer wasn't especially happy with the mix, but—as with Vaughn's novel—I rather appreciated it.


In Prepare To Die, Steve Clarke is the Reaver, a fairly standard-issue superhero with a tragic origin story—an Oregon origin, in fact, involving a chemical spill—and a suite of fairly standard-issue powers (super strength, speed and healing powers, for example). Plus, if he punches you, you have one less year to live—it's kind of his signature move, with a catchphrase and all.

Reaver also has anger-management issues, an unenlightened teenage boy's attitudes towards sex (about which more anon), a fair amount of guilt over the fates of his friends and family, and... frankly, he's not all that bright. Which means that when he goes up against the criminal mastermind Octagon and the league of super-criminals known as Eleventh Hour, Steve gets beaten. Badly. Octagon is magnanimous in victory, though, and when the Reaver asks nicely, Octagon gives him two weeks to... Prepare To Die.

So Steve makes a list of things he'd like to do before Octagon finishes him off, and he heads West. Home, that is—back to rustic Greenway, Oregon, where it all began.

Greenway is not a real town, by the way—and there's no rural Interstate 184 in Oregon, either. Despite being based in Portland, Paul Tobin doesn't work much local color into this book... other than an oddly specific mention of Sassy's, a Southeast Portland strip club I've often driven by but somehow never managed to go into.

The name-check for a specific strip club may seem jarring, but it does fit... Prepare To Die is actually much raunchier in general than the other mainstream entries I've read in this subgenre. Its subtitle is, after all, "A Novel of Superheroes, Sex and Secret Origins" (and Tobin's Acknowledgments reveal that at least some of this book was actually written in Sassy's).

However, the sex in this book is for the most part very... adolescent. For all his power, Steve Clarke does not seem to have matured much beyond his teenaged pre-super self. He's preoccupied with masturbation, with counting conquests, with the manifold variations of Internet superhero porn and—eventually—with getting back to his childhood sweetheart, a girl who first agreed to date him while he was riding on top of a station wagon in his underwear. Add in a lesbian sister who likes to go around topless and multiple musings on the sexual mystique of superpowers in action, and the Sassy's reference starts to make more sense.


Having been an adolescent male myself (though it was awhile ago), I was willing to give this book some slack, though. Steve eventually does do some growing up, and the Reaver does some wising up. Emotional maturity isn't exactly a superpower, but it's no Achilles' heel, either. Reaver's final battle with Octagon reveals that, along with a few other more surprising things.

Prepare To Die is... well, it could've been a lot worse and I probably still would have liked it. But for a novel that takes the superhero pejorative "underwear perverts" a bit too literally... it wasn't bad.

[Adam · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hate not being able to finish a book. No, really, I absolutely hate it. I dwelled on this one for a while and decided that if reading it feels like work then it's probably best to quit. I want my reading to be enjoyable. It was a co-workers recommendation.
I know the cover mentions sex however, it's constant. It's in your face and what I hate is that women are objectified. They are one dimensional helpless characters who are completely sex driven. You gotta be kidding me. The book also so far has stopped multiple times to tell me about the past. It's driving me crazy. The book is also full of contradictions. You won't shoplift because it's wrong? But you will shoplift later on because it seems okay? Your brother never gave away alcohol for sex? But then you tell me on the same page that he has?

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This felt like a ridiculous adolescent boy's fantasy. The main character has had sex with all of the female heroes, villains, and various celebrity models during the 10 years he was a hero. He thinks he's going to die and goes back to his hometown to settle his affairs. One item on his list (and the main plot of the story) is him going to see his high school girlfriend...who just happened to have still been in love with him the whole time and couldn't bring herself to be with any other guy.
So he gets all the sex but she doesn't move on? 12 year old me would have loved this book. 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

[VICTORIA · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well this is the first book I've not finished in a long time just because it's so bad. There really isnt anything I liked about the book... the premise seemed pretty cool, then it turned into a total let down. I should have read the reviews first instead of not at all. I couldn't feel for the characters at all. Sorry but I really did try to like it.

[Jelena]

DNF

Gave up 50ish% in. I'm really not the one to scream misogyny easily, but this was horrible. I suspected it'll be a hard read from the beginning, but I like to challenge myself with different perspectives and genres. Unfortunately, couldn't even finish this. It's like it was written by 13-year old boy in the 80s, not a whole grown ass man in 2012. Yikes.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This would be a great movie.
Good guys, bad guys. And a promise.
The putting affairs in order, delicious.
Read it, read it now.

[What]

good

[Germán Landart · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm so glad I found this book. The characters felt so real. Just 5 out of 5

[Bryan O'Sullivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good parts, but felt like it was written by a 12-year-old at times.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Once in awhile, someone in the comic book industry wants to write a dark comic book. This is that book. Steve Clarke is Reaver, one of the super beings who came out of a chemical spill in a remote town in Oregon with powers like never before. He can't fly, but his punch takes away a year off the life of his opponent. He is nearly invulnerable with rapid healing agents coursing through his blood.

But Steve has a problem. He has fought the super-villain, Octagon, and the band of super-villains to a standstill. Octagon steps to his defeated foe, puts his super gun to his head and tells Steve to "Prepare to Die!" and Steve asks how long. He makes a deal to re-present himself to Octagon and his band of super miscreants in two weeks, and goes back home to make some things right, one of them being with Adele, the love of his life.

Tobin has a problem, too. This book is written as if the author had ADD. The author overloads the book with flashbacks that at time provide the reader important information. All to often, it comes across as a flashback to a battle with a super-villain that comes across as just a reminder that the author is writing a superhero book. The herky-jerky pacing of the book hurts the ebb and flow from time to time, and was very frustrating to me.

There were some interesting real-world philosophical ideas presented in the book. For example, how tiring it must be to be a hero. How weary a person might become from saving the world over and over and over. How one must set aside his own life to be a hero. Why one might choose to be a villain, besides just being crazed by power...

Tobin also shares some interesting twists and turns in the book. Unlike most comic books, heroes do die, never to return. And there are some secrets that hinted at early one, but slowly revealed in the final chapters of the book... secrets that will amaze the reader and make the book worth seeing through to the end. Finally, the reason for Octagon's allowing Steve those two weeks is revealed and it is a bit stunning as well.

I think Tobin realized that the book was very dark in nature, and needed something to lighten it up Rather than choosing parody (and the book is a dark parody of superhero stories, and very dark) he attempts to lighten the book with juvenile sexual humor and innuendo. On one level, this works for a time, but then it just comes across as very juvenile. Discussions of masturbation, pornography, sex play, and other often very crude sexual innuendo abound. One character, Laura, Steve's true love's lesbian sister, walks around shirtless in several chapters of the book. Her crude talk might seem to be an attempt to add depth to her character, but really comes across as very immature and shallow-- and really adds nothing to the book. In my opinion, the dark nature of the book should never have been tampered with. The sexual innuendo, exploits, etc. may serve to humanize Steve to some extent, but the theme of the book is not helped by it.

It is almost as if Tobin wanted to do a pornographic comic book in which he would be permitted to use every expletive and innuendo imaginative, and no regular publisher would allow it, so it wrote it instead as a novel. A dark, sexually charged, profane, novel. The sexual overtones and the obscene language so drenches that pages of this novel (without ever really being sexually grapchic, I might add--other than the mention of nudity, etc.) really detracts from the overall sad story of how Steve left behind the love of his life in order to be a hero, and what all he gave up and some of the sufferings he endured and a sense of personal loss.... That's the story.. That's the good stuff.

Is this a good book? Well, perhaps better than I rated it. I'd give it 2.5 stars if there was a method of dividing the rating. Why? Because it does tell a moving, personal, story in a comic book world that is fun and full of interesting heroes and villains and it does make some important points about what the life of a real life super would be. Having to wade through all the other stuff drags it down from an adult to a juvenile level. It could have been much better if the author had stayed with the darker overtones.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a hoot!

I was walking through the library looking for someone else when I noticed this book, and with a title like "Prepare to die!", how could I resist? Happily, it lived up to the bombast implied in the title, and my craving for a rock-em, sock-em superhero adventure was fulfilled.

The basic premise is that the last of the superheroes gets his butt handed to him by the team of supervillains, who tell him (in classic comic book speak) to "prepare to die" - to which he responds "ok, I'll need a few weeks". The story is then what our hero does with those weeks. This, to me, is a truly novel take on the classic superhero conflict and the implications for confronting mortality, and for that alone, this is worth a read for anyone who is interested in superheroes or comics.

The style is breezy and conversational: I haven't read any of Tobin's comic work, but this certainly recommends it. Attention Hollywood: this would make a pretty good superhero movie, although I don't know whether it would be a franchise, so maybe not. Tobin does a great job of conveying the lack of wisdom and maturity which would come along with being thrust into the spotlight as a teenager- especially when paired with strength, invulnerability, and healing. Our hero has a good amount of growing to do, and Tobin handles that quite well. There is a lot of sex in the book, although the subtitle does give that away, it's still a noticeable amount. It does make sense, however, when considered in light of the fact that all of these super-beings are hyped-up teenagers, with amplified hormones.

There are some flaws: the "male gaze" common in comic art rears its head in some of the depiction of the sexual behavior and language of two of the female characters, and a couple of the things are never quite explained (Mary's actions, for example). However, the book is good. In fact, it's quite good.

Recommended.

[Burgoo · Rating 4 out of 5]

When superhero Steve Clarke (aka Reaver) is defeated by Octagon & his band of evil henchmen, rather than killing him on the spot, he is given two weeks to live. We follow Steve as he attempts to complete his modest bucket list, which primarily consists of unfinished business from his life before he became a superhero.

Clarke’s world is clearly post Miller & Moore. The heroes are burdened by their abilities and the consequences of their actions. The villains are very very evil. There are less wacky bank jobs and more burning schoolchildren alive. Clarke himself is a big dumb lug of a hero. Thanks to the silver age origin story, he goes from being a sexually repressed teenager to a beefy guy who hits things.

The pacing and use of superhero tropes is excellent. Tobin’s use of flashbacks allows us to learn about the history of the Reaver. His encounters with other heroes and villains propel the story forward even as they flesh out the world.

Somewhat problematic is Tobin’s treatment of women and sexuality. Female characters are consistently underdeveloped, and over sexualized. And while I have not done a head count, the feeling is that more female characters are villainous than not. Some of this is attributable to the story being told from Clarke’s POV. He is after all, a superbro. Still, I would have liked to see more three dimensional characterization of some female characters (in particular Adele).


***slight spoiler***
The ending was wonderful. After wallowing in the grimgritty world of the Reaver, Tobin shows that the answer is to uphold classic heroic values. Why? Because the world needs the symbol of heroes, even if the reality does not truly match that symbol. Even if imperfect, I applaud the effort to meld a realistic tone with the idealism of past generations.

[Steven Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the deconstructing of super heroes. Alan Moore did it with Watchmen, Garth Ennis did with his The Boys series and to a lesser extent Chuck Austen with his short lived Worldwatch series now I can add Paul Tobin's Prepare To Die to that list. I know other reviewers felt the book was crude and misogynistic and I can see where they are coming from but if you can suspend those opinions there is a well constructed, no holds barred and touching novel there. Tobin does not pull any punches with his characters; what you see is what you get, warts and all, which makes them human and relatable even though they wear spandex. Our main character Steve Clarke (Reaver) is not likable, he is a womanizer, he is not noble but he is still a super hero and he gets the job done. However, the longer you read this novel the more Tobin is able to make Clarke sympathetic and realize even though he has powers he can still love a high school sweetheart even though they have been apart over 10 years, he can mourn the loss of fellow heroes and feel guilt and shame when he was scared or unsure of what to do in certain situations just like many of us feel in our daily lives. If you can get pass the sexual exploits of our hero and sex based villains he encounters Tobin writes scenes with tenderness, courage and humor. His world building is excellent and makes me want to see more of this world. I do admit the overuse of the "three times (insert whatever action)" line got tiresome but it was a small bother compared to all the good Tobin puts into this novel. And lastly the action scenes are top notch and realistic if you can say that with super heroes and super villians. For his first novel I think Paul Tobin did a fine job and look forward to more stories in the world of Reaver.