Prototype

Meeting an injured man in the hospital who warded off three attackers, Adrienne finds her life forever changed by Clay, a genetically engineered individual who has been programmed to be one of the most dangerous people on earth. Original.

This sixth novel from underappreciated horror writer Brian Hodge uses the premise of a superstrong, superviolent loner with a chromosome anomaly to ask how Nietzsche's Übermensch might fare in pre-apocalyptic America. The story's central irony is that the hero is oddly powerless: he has an artist's temperament--his few friends are reclusive underground artists--and is deeply self-doubting. He longs to know his nature and purpose as a monster, so he turns first to psychotherapy and hypnosis, then to a search for others of his kind. His companions in this quest are a bisexual psychologist and her female lover (a cultural anthropologist studying "contemporary tribes of discontent and disillusion"). The plot is a bit thin, but the imagery and ideas are intriguing--albeit self-consciously postmodern--and the characters are eerily convincing as outsiders to a society they condemn for its "rule by the mediocre."