Review: Batman: Nightwalker

Batman: Nightwalker by Marie Lu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Never thought I'd live to see the day when my five-star streak for Marie Lu books ended. (Well, in hindsight I'd probably rate The Midnight Star four stars, but I'm talking about reading a Marie Lu book and getting an instant five-star vibe here.) I think the main reason why Batman: Nightwalker didn't click for me as well as I was hoping was, not unlike The Midnight Star, it was just too short a book to let Lu's strengths truly shine. And there's a lot of tiny gripes I've got that seem to magnify themselves the more I think about them. Like how Bruce Wayne isn't really Batman here, not at age eighteen, while Leigh Bardugo's Wonder Woman: Warbringer really made it clear that we were getting a younger but no less iconic Diana. And it's not like the Gotham TV series where pre-Bats Bruce isn't the sole focus of the whole thing - Gotham is a big old crime-time soap filtered through a Burtonian lens, while Lu's book only gives us a 250-page glimpse into this particular 'verse. Not to mention the title villain group feels more than a bit formless, like a strange cross between Occupy and the Court of Owls, but more opportunistic than the former and less spooky than the other. And as for Madeline...interesting she was, but as a sort of femme fatale to confound and intrigue Bruce, she kinda fills Catwoman's role here, and doesn't that make Sarah J. Maas' upcoming Soulstealer a little redundant in that case?

But for its faults, this book has some pretty good strengths too. Mostly in terms of social commentary. Lu's no stranger to that, of course, not with the class warfare present in much of her earlier bibliography. But here, we get some pretty stark and standout moments - like, when Bruce is hospitalized after trying to chase down Nightwalkers in his souped-up Aston Martin, and runs into the police, and Lucius Fox tells him he's lucky he's a white guy or else he might have gotten worse than a concussion. Or, again, the Nightwalkers themselves. Like I said, they're a pretty nebulous group, but some of their schemes take their Occupy-inspired ideology to some sick, diabolical extremes. It reminds me a lot of how Bane was perceived as an allegory for Occupy in The Dark Knight Rises.

And then there's teenage Bruce himself. I already expected he'd be better than the version we got on Gotham - no offense to David Mazouz, but as good as his performance is, it doesn't make up for the fact that the show's writers basically pigeonhole him into playing a spoiled rotten assbutt (who, especially in the current season, has been hitting the club scene pretty hard, sex and drugs and rock and roll and all that.) Then again, Mazouz is playing a sixteen-year-old Bruce, I'm thinking. Or maybe seventeen. Either way, Lu writes Bruce as older, and while not fully mature, he's definitely wiser than his Fox TV counterpart all the same.

At this point, I'm thinking Bardugo's Wonder Woman will be the best DC Icons novel when all is said and done. That is, unless Salami impresses me with Soulstealer, though let's be honest, that's exceedingly unlikely. And unless they bring in a new author for the Superman novel, which they'd better now that the original author's been outed as a serial sexual harasser. I'd like to nominate Neal Shusterman or Jay Kristoff for the job myself. Or, even better, one of Supes' biggest fans, the great Sam Ayers.

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