‘The Green Shadow’ Has Landed
I have completed my superhero prose series, Terrific. All four books now exist in physical form. The Flying Woman. The Silver Stranger. The Faceless Man. And at last, The Green Shadow, which you can now find on Amazon (and soon, other platforms).
I’ve been working toward this day since 2003, when I started writing a play about a young woman who develops telepathy and discovers that people she knows are secretly superheroes. That play, Super!, led to a pilot script for a nonexistent TV series I called Selfless, and that led to scripts for a comic book series I called Terrific, which inspired a prose series of the same name.
After a few failed novel drafts, I finally landed on the right story and published The Flying Woman in 2018. A second novel followed in 2022 with The Silver Stranger (the closest of the quartet to the original play, though still very different), and the third book struggled until I shifted from novels to shorter stories that build on each other, which I serialized here on Substack. Instead of a third and final novel, I ended up with two story collections: The Faceless Man and The Green Shadow.
Throughout all of that, the core premise remained constant: superhero identities as the cocoons in which people developed into their best selves.
In the superhero genre, at one end of spectrum you’ve got the purely benevolent, flawless superheroes of the Superfriends mold. At the other, the cynical non-heroes of The Boys and the like. To me, more interesting than either extreme is the question of how a flawed person becomes a true superhero. What’s it like for a fallible human being to try to live up to such an exceptional ideal?
That theme continues all the way through The Green Shadow.
Synopsis for The Green Shadow
This is the end. Maybe the end of everything.
For two years, Miranda has tried to become the best Ultra Woman possible. She’s defeated many foes and rescued countless lives. But she hasn’t saved everyone.
Her failures haunt her in the form of the Green Shadow, an ominous specter that lingers in the corner of her eye, reminding Miranda that she isn’t built to be a perfect hero.
In other tales, Alyssa meets a man who can create paradise, but only at a tremendous cost. Ken experiences a bizarre metamorphosis. Carey struggles to adapt to a flawed world. And a deadly villain prepares to strike at last.
This final sequence of stories brings the TERRIFIC series to its thrilling conclusion, as imperfect people must strive to be the heroes their world needs … or there may not be a world much longer.
Read the full announcement on my Substack.
Thank you!
