Save the Day
DJ Fahl
FurPlanet Books

I want to encourage amateur authors to make that leap into professional writing. God knows it’s hard to write a novel, and it takes a lot of guts to put it out there for everyone to read. This kind of thing should be encouraged. The world needs good writers and I want to find those people that have the talent and the drive to write great literature. As a critic it’s my job to not only praise the authors that produce quality work, but also to critique authors, in the hopes that they become better.

That said, Save the Day is not a good book.

I wish it was, I really do. And not just because the book is about superheroes (I love superheroes!), but because the entire book is so earnest. Author DJ Fahl cares a lot about the characters, and the world he’s created, and that shows. It’s a good trait to have, but that alone doesn’t make a novel worth reading.

Save the Day is the story of a superhero named Star Coyote, who is struggling with his life in tights. He has to balance saving his city, keeping a job, and having a boyfriend. Add on to that the fact that he’s in the closet with his teammates, the superhero squad knows as The Extraordinaries. It’s not so much a superhero story as it is a coming out story, that happens to feature superheroes.

First of all, DJ Fahl should immediately fire his editor. They are awful, just… so terrible. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors abound. I always feel like a tool bringing that up, but these are really basic things like commas, “then/than”, “affect/effect” and proper tense. Hell, even character’s names get misspelled. This is a published novel, it’s inexcusable.

Secondly, there’s just too much shit in this book. Save the Day is a monstrous, bloated beast of a novel. It’s seriously the longest furry book I’ve ever read. And unfortunately most of that is because the author over explains everything. Every little tiny detail about every hero mentioned is laid out in the book, usually in a giant hunk of exposition that just gets slapped down in the middle of a chapter. It’s like having that friend that can’t tell a story without interjecting all those useless details you don’t care about. If this book were a person, I would grab it by the shoulders, shake it, and yell, “Get to the fucking point already!”

It’s a book about superheroes, I don’t give a shit about the scientific reasons behind every little thing. A bit of that is fine, but when exposition is overdone it becomes annoying, and it ruins the pacing of the story. Plus the more the author explains everybody’s powers, the more ridiculous it sounds, making it harder and harder to suspend my disbelief. Don’t try and tell me that flying into a tornado in the opposite direction to neutralize it makes sense, because it doesn’t. Just do it and don’t apologize because it’s a fucking superhero story!

It doesn’t help that there are just way too many characters. It’s like Fahl is trying to create an entire universe in a single novel. Look, DC and Marvel have these huge rosters and massive backstories because they took decades to tell them. It’s not fair to try and cram all this in one book and force readers to digest it. And not to get nitpicky, but the “furries in the real world” scenario is tricky. It raises too many questions. Every time the author says “man/woman” it makes no sense. Or when he talks about Nazis. Who was furry Hitler? Why couldn’t Power Puma just be a “feline supremacist” and we could skip the furry Holocaust (is it like Maus)?

Maybe if the characters were interesting it wouldn’t be as bad, but for the most part they’re not compelling. The two main characters, who tell the story in alternating first-person perspective, read exactly the same. It not only makes the book hard to follow when it switches perspective, but keeps it from being believable or compelling. I couldn’t get into it, from the very first chapter when Jay comes off like an enabler (You bought a house with a dude you think is cheating on you? Are you high?) and Ted comes off like an emo whiner. Yes, coming out is scary, but stop being such a bitch about it.

Nearly all of the side characters are useless (in terms of the plot) and should have been combined into a couple characters. Sure, all of the heroes and villains get together at the end for a massive battle, but it was wholly unnecessary to have that many people in there, since most of them are completely one dimensional.

The plot is a coming out story, but that’s a pretty flimsy plot to drag on for hundreds of pages. It takes forever for things to get rolling, and then once they do it seems like it should be wrapped up pretty quick, but instead the “oh I hope my teammates don’t find out I’m gay” thing gets dragged out. Really the plot doesn’t even really get going until the last couple chapters. The rest of the book feels like a bunch of short stories with no overarching plot, jammed together. The final battle is an attempt at tying the previous scenes together, but it feels rushed and comes off really hokey.

Everyone in this book is a grown-ass adult, but they all speak and act with a level of immaturity that makes it feel like Smallville instead of The Justice League. There’s a lot wrong with the story, that could have been easily fixed. For example, characters talk about all these heroes who died in the past, and we’re supposed to care, but nobody important dies in the course of the book, missing a major opportunity to add emotional weight to the story. Or hell, if one of the superheroes actually did have a problem with Star Coyote being gay, then I could understand his hesitancy, but the fact is that all of them are really cool about it (the only guy who gets mad does so for a totally understandable reason).

On top of everything, the author doesn’t seem to know anything about the places he’s writing about. Sure, while it’s not a big deal to have a scene in Minneapolis not have any sort of landmarks or knowledge of the city, it becomes a much bigger deal for the main character’s hometown of Portland Oregon. Remember the entire plot is about Star Coyote being afraid of coming out, and how everyone is going to hate him. So why set it in Portland of all places? Oregon has a higher percentage of openly gay elected officials than most states. Portland is one of the most liberal cities in the country, and has had an openly gay mayor since 2005! The only way this scenario could have been more ridiculous would have been to set it in San Francisco.

When Fahl finally shuts up and actually starts writing about superheroes doing what they do best, it’s actually not so bad. I found myself enjoying the battle scenes. The action was intense, but it was easy to follow. Every character has a unique power, and Fahl clearly knows how he wants them all to act. I perked up each time the plot moved towards an actual superhero scene. I want more of this. More superheroes being superheroes, and less melodramatic arguments between people I don’t care about. Stories don’t always need to be romances, and this one really didn’t. If more work had been put into tying all these villains together, or leading up to some huge event that required the Extraordinaries to trust each other, it would have had more resonance than having everyone talk about their feelings.

Also of note are the illustrations by Vince Suzukawa, which are one of the highlights of the book. Suzukawa knows how to draw his muscular furries, and superheroes is a good fit for his style. The illustrations also match well with the story (it’s a pet peeve of mine when they have continuity differences).

With the right editor, Save the Day could have been a decent novel. It’s twice as long as it needs to be, crammed full of inconsequential fluff, and riddled with spelling and grammar errors. But Fahl isn’t a bad writer. There are parts in here that are engaging and exciting, and I want to see him develop his writing more and keep going. But I can’t recommend this book.