Fight Me

By: Austin Grossman

Narrated by: Adam Sims

Brought to you by Penguin.

Dr Rick Tower is a mild-mannered English professor easing into middle-age at a medium-sized New England college. A genial blur, he thinks. Even his vices are unremarkable.

But it wasn’t always like this. Not until they changed his name, altered his looks and told him: ‘pretend you were never different’.

Because, decades earlier after a very bad day at high school, he was committed to a secret government facility with three other kids, Cat, Jack and Stephanie, each special in their own way. Tested, tutored and trained, this extraordinary quartet were then told to save the world.

It was the best thing that ever happened to them. Until it became the worst.

Now, twenty years after the tragedy that forced him into academic non-entity, a mysterious disappearance means Tower must reunite with his former comrades. Each returns with their own agenda. And while great power come might come with great responsibility, there’s little of that on display from any of them.

Combining compelling storytelling and fierce imagination with a rich cast of characters, Fight Me is a pulse-pounding and distinctive thriller, a unique tale of good and evil, and a memorable portrait of man trying to do the right thing at any cost. Against impossible odds...

©2024 Austin Grossman (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

'A treasure that manages to be sad, funny, and hilariously fun at all once. A thrilling adventure but also a searing, intimate look at what it would really cost to have such incredible power, and yet still be human.' (Peng Shepherd, bestselling author of The Cartographers)

'Fight Me embraces the fun of the genre, while treating its battle-weary characters with heart and empathy. A noir-tinged Big Chill for the superhero set.' (Bob Proehl, author of The Nobody People)

'Grossman's novel of wealth, power, fraught loves and friendships flexes epic muscles beneath its superhero costume.' (D.B. Weiss, co-creator of Game of Thrones)

Tenenbaums in Tights

A novel about sad middle aged “gifted” kids wrapped in a loving and skillful homage to Bronze Age/ Iron Age comic books. The character bits hit a little too close to home for me to judge objectively, but the comic book bits are pitch perfect. Highly recommended.

Great story; literature that happens to use superheros as a backdrop

Alot of action is mentioned and not shown, characters seem to be the only focus of the book.

Sad-sack Shazam Throws Away his Shot

This is an objectively good science fiction novel (at least by any measure which includes things like: 'crunchy' LitRPGs; insecure 'girl collector' epics; or the Virtually Voiced) and I have no regrets about purchasing it, but it was a frustrating read.

Fight Me's characters proved very hard for me to empathize with (mostly due to the genre's skewed motivational palette of 'Agog Obdeience' through to 'Sociopathic Surprise Party!') This meant the character-driven plot was often quite impenetrable to me as well. I honestly still have no idea how any version of Shazam could be spending 75% of his time getting beat-up and bretayed and just doing nothing about it at all.

However, I still listened with relish and was kept engaged and guessing right up until the very last sentence. If you don't mind a bit of pastiche-induced cognitive dissonance this is a well-crafted and nuanced tale from a talented craftsman.

Unreliable narrator & time machines

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Grossman’s prior works. This one opens like “invincible” and then concludes more like “you”. It’s just not hitting for me as well as the others did, the protagonist is ultimately unlikeable and the ambiguity- of pretty much everything - leaves me unsatisfied by the ending. I guess that’s life, but it’s not what I look for in a novel usually. I will continue to read this author however.
Narrator is ok. His odd pronunciation of the word “hover” really takes me out of the story.

Very fun follow-up to Grossman’s first superhero novel - a page turner with compelling characters

Very creative story about some unlikely superheroes/villains that any fan of Soon I Will Be Invincible — though no need to read that book first.

Performance and story

I loved the book right up to the very end, where almost nothing is resolved. it becomes just some lengthy allegory.