n a world where, until a few short years ago, the streets were rocked by battles between colorfully clad men and women with astounding metanormal powers, the people have declared all-out war against these modern-day titans. Following the destruction of the city of San Francisco in a super-battle gone bad, the federal government has issued an executive order outlawing not only the use of super powers, but also the very people who possess them. For the beings known as Metas, it doesn't matter whether they commit crimes, save lives or just try to live normal lives without ever using their powers; they're all regarded as public enemies, and as such the legal prey of the murderous police division known as M-Tac.
The M-Tac cops of the city of Los Angeles, who battle shape-changers, telepaths, super-speedsters and even more horrific menaces on a daily basis, are obsessed with killing the people they call "freaks" and "muties," and they have to be. It takes a special kind of driven personality to remain a member of an elite squad that averages a 50 percent mortality rate per mission. None of them expect to live long. They don't care. They just want to take down as many Metas as they can.
Soledad O'Roark is a rookie M-Tac whose single-minded hatred of the Metas is extreme even by the obsessive standards of her profession. She wants every Meta—good, bad or indifferent—dead and buried, and she doesn't care how ruthless she has to be to accomplish it. Soledad earns the hated nickname "Bullet" on her very first call, when she uses an unauthorized gun of her own design to blow away a rampaging pyrokinetic in the act of frying her squad. The hi-tech gun, which comes complete with color-coded bullets designed to exploit the individual weaknesses of various common Metas, saves her life and the lives of several of her partners, but the department brass still demotes her, and considers filing charges, for her failure to follow official procedure. Why punish her for getting the job done? Soledad's lawyer, Gayle, suspects a conspiracy.
Michelle, an angelic winged woman who possesses the ability to heal the sick and bring back the lives of innocents killed in disasters, lives in hiding with her telepathic husband, Vaughn, and a mentally retarded metal manipulator named Aubrey. When Michelle reveals herself in order to restore the lives of an entire construction crew killed in a deadly street collapse, Soledad just shoots the winged woman dead, dismissing the horrified reaction of one witness with a shrugged "She's not an Angel. Angels don't bleed. She's just another freak."
Soledad doesn't know that the grieving Vaughn is about to succumb to the anger his gentle wife held in check for so long, and declare war against the M-Tacs.
An anti-hero who's literally anti-hero
John Ridley is an accomplished writer of noirish crime novels whose works to date include Everybody Smokes in Hell, Stray Dogs (filmed as the Oliver Stone movie U-Turn) and the original story that became the George Clooney film Three Kings. His prose is tough and vivid, his characters ruthless, hard-boiled and beset by personal demons. He seems a most unlikely candidate for writer to suddenly change direction and write, of all things, a superhero novel.
It helps that Those Who Walk in Darkness is a dark piece of work, set in a world that has not only turned its back on its heroes but also rejected their right to exist. The scenes between the M-Tac officers are profane and funny, driven by the horror of their daily lives and their shared awareness of their truncated life expectancies. The scenes involving the handful of sympathetic Meta characters are haunted and sad, driven by their ironic sense of their own powerlessness. The romance that lurks in the background is touching and quirky and a terrific portrait of what happens when one person who has erected walls around herself encounters another determined to keep chipping away at the brick.
It also helps that Soledad O'Roark herself is a fascinating protagonist, though there's little that would qualify her as heroine. Brittle, abrasive, isolated from family and friends, driven by her intense hatred for the "freaks" and "muties" she blames for the loss of San Francisco, she carries out her little war with no sense of perspective whatsoever. She just wants to kill them. In short, she would be very much at home appearing as the obsessed mutant hunter of a typical X-Men story, and Ridley devotes a significant percentage of her story to demonstrating that nothing's ever likely to change her mind. It doesn't matter whether she's confronted by the miracles wrought by the doomed Michelle, the eloquent words of a lawyer who remembers the lives good Metas saved, or the wounded decency of another Meta damned to life in a cell for the crime of just wanting to mind his own business. Soledad's determination to take down the "freaks," preferably with deadly force, never wavers.
She's pretty hateful, really. Her ability to maintain a love life with a nice guy—even one with downright superhuman persistence—is downright amazing. Indeed, by the time Vaughn takes her on, you almost want him to win. (He is, after all, the one whose wife was murdered for no good reason.) But what makes Soledad so compelling, despite the queasy morality of her crusade, is her toughness and her unstoppable resolve. Nothing fazes the woman. Even in Ridley's intensely violent and hyper-kinetic action scenes, which capture with perfect fidelity just how nightmarish these super-powered battles would really be for vulnerable human beings caught at ground zero, she remains the most dangerous player on the field. So what if her opponents have godlike powers? So what if her allies are falling, dead or maimed, all around her? Soledad still has her gun and her attitude. It's an even match.
