03-JUNE-08
Rob Rogers told SCI FI Wire that his novel Devil's Cape is a superhero novel in which the world is filled with heroes, but the book focuses on a city that has none to protect it.
The setting--the fictional city of Devil's Cape, La.--is a dark, corrupt place run by crime lords, villains and thugs, Rogers said in an interview.
In the book, a group of superpowered criminals and murderers--a team of former carnival freaks called the Cirque d'Obscurite--returns to Devil's Cape after having been on the run for years.
"A team of superheroes from another part of the country comes to Devil's Cape to try to arrest the Cirque d'Obscurite, and things go really badly for the heroes," Rogers said. "That incident drives the action of the rest of the book, as three new heroes rise up to try to stop the Cirque d'Obscurite and the crime lord the freaks work for, the Robber Baron."
Rogers didn't want all the superhuman elements to come from the same source. "That kind of shared background works really well in the Wild Cards books, for example, where the differences between that world and the real world start with an alien virus," Rogers said. "But I wanted something more closely resembling the messy, disconnected backgrounds of most comic-book universes."
The three protagonists of the book are "Argonaut, who gets his powers from Greek myth; Doctor Camelot, a brilliant scientist wearing high-tech armor; and Bedlam, who has been magically cursed," Rogers said. "That's a pretty good indication of the kind of disparate backgrounds in the book."
Devil's Cape is a synthesis of all the things Rogers has loved since he was a kid, he said. "Superheroes, pirates, carnivals, fantasy, science fiction, crime stories and action," he said. "I tried to write the kind of book I like to read."
Rogers said that superhero fiction seemed like an untapped niche. "There were books out there, of course, but most were different from what I intended, either featuring licensed characters from comic books or taking a satirical tone and making fun of the genre," he said. "I wanted to play things straight, imagining what it might be like to live in a world of superheroes." --John Joseph Adams
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