by Peter Newman
One of the things that I love about Wild Cards and superheroes in general is the way it can take its characters from one genre to another.
Wild Cards is a world that can handle alien invasions, murder mystery, time travel, political thrillers, family drama and, more recently, romance!
Given that it’s the season to be spooky, I thought I’d talk a little about House Rules (*cough* available from all good bookstores *cough*), where heroes old and new get taken out of their comfort zones and go on a trip to Loveday House, where nothing is quite as it seems.
Superheroes and horror is nothing new. We’ve seen Batman go up against Dracula, the Alien, Predator, Frankenstein and we’ve even seen him team up with Scooby-Doo(!), but I digress. One of the things that set a superhero apart from regular folk like you and me is that they are able to do things we can’t, and they’re able to manage situations that most sane people would run away from.
I love seeing characters boldly vanquishing threats and making the world a better place, but I also love seeing them struggle too.
Introducing a bit of true terror into Wild Cards gives us the chance to test our characters in a different way. When someone like Enigma or Stone Rockford come up against a villain with a gun, they’re not in any real danger. Bullets are just going to bounce off men made of metal or stone. But put them in contact with the dead, or send them to hell (or worse!), get under that impervious skin, and you can see what they’re really made of.
It’s something that has always fascinated me. How do we react when the world stops making sense? How do we cope when our strength (super powered or otherwise) isn’t enough? Do we stay true to our beliefs when holding them places us in genuine peril?
House Rules is full of stories where the characters are forced to face unsettling truths, strange happenings and, more importantly, their own shortcomings.
One of the nice things about having a series that’s run for so long is that characters like Gary Bushorn have been around for a long while. They have history from previous stories and they’ve made mistakes, mistakes which haunt them (literally in some cases). As I mentioned in a previous post, because there are no reboots in Wild Cards, it means there are lasting consequences for character actions, and this feels especially true in House Rules.
For this collection I wrote a story called Two Lovedays, which brings a young and impressionable hero (Stuart Hill aka Hero McHeroface) into contact with his idols, the Silver Helix. He has to battle his nerves at the same time as babysitting his younger sister while something strange begins to unravel in the background. Of course, everything goes horribly, horribly wrong.
And that’s just one of the stories. There are mysteries, hauntings, and a fair amount of blood, death and tears lurking within the works of fellow authors Stephen Leigh, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Caroline Spector, Kevin Andrew Murphy and Peadar Ó Guilín.
That’s not to say there aren’t lighter moments in the book, humour to heighten the horror, but if you fancy a bit of super with your spooky this year, Wild Cards has your back.