My Experience with Spider-Man: Hostile Takeover by David Liss

I’ve read Spider-Man comics and watched Spider-Man cartoons and movies. I’ve even played Spider-Man video games. But read a Spider-Man novel? This is a first for me. But I’ll subject myself to almost any experience for my favorite web-slinger. And I’ve got good news: David Liss translated Peter Parker’s experience beautifully.

Spider-Man: Hostile Takeover is a prequel novel to the Spider-Man PlayStation 4 video game. The former Kingpin of Crime, Wilson Fisk, is winning back the public as he uses his vast wealth and influence to make New York a better, more livable community for everyone. But Spider-Man isn’t buying it. He knows something is amiss when another guy claiming to be Spider-Man shows up and tarnishes his good name. Spider-Man teams up with a detective in the police department to uncover Fisk’s secrets and take down the Kingpin by the book.

What makes Spider-Man a great hero is his origin story and his unwavering devotion to keeping his city a safe place—even when it gets hard. Hostile Takeover is no exception. Struggling to balance work, his relationship with Mary Jane, and a full-time career as a masked vigilante, Peter is constantly pulled in multiple directions.

Liss’s experience with writing marvel comic books makes this version of Spider-Man and his universe feel authentic to what we might expect from a web-head story in both tone and personality. The action scenes are easy to read and visualize. And the dialogue is better than what we usually get in the comics.

There’s one thing that I found odd about this story: the number of unnecessary scene breaks. It’s not that there were too many. That doesn’t matter to me. A story needs as many as a story needs. But many of them felt unnecessary and disorienting when starting a new paragraph would be sufficient Perhaps this was an attempt to mimic a comic’s pacing, but novels aren’t comics. Understanding the medium is important when creating within it.

I easily recommend this book if you’re a Spider-Man fan. Whether you enjoyed the movies, comics, or the video games (especially if you liked the recent PS4 game), this is a novel that superhero fans can appreciate.