12 books like Nemesis

Sometimes you want your heroes to be serious and sometimes you want them to be wacky.

Andrea Vernon is a series that goes running toward wackiness then sails right past it. The story of a secretary at a private military contractor that specializes in goofy, ridiculous, and terrifying effective superheroes, this is one of the most fun novels I've enjoyed in years.

Andrea is a delightful Lois Lane figure who is stuck being the only normal person in the weirdest office in the world. It reminded me of the old Damage Control comics. 

I adore superhero fiction, but it is hard to find good versions of it outside of visual mediums like comics and film. This book was one of the first superhero novels I found, and it is a lot of fun.

Penelope wants nothing more than to develop superpowers and be a hero like her parents, but instead, she develops mad scientist powers that lead to utter chaos! I squirmed as the young characters got themselves deeper and deeper into trouble, but I also laughed at this madcap superhero world filled with puns, metal-eating robots, and epic adventure. 

Lena Martin is given the job of tracking down Shattergirl, a black lesbian superhero who has dropped out of sight. I love this book because it’s not your usual superhero story. 

It takes a dive into how public perception affects who we are willing to accept as heroes, how other people’s preconceptions care wear down marginalized people, and how having to hide parts of yourself can distance you from those around you.

Kit is a scavenger in a city ruined by an alien spaceship that crashed decades ago, giving rise to superheroes. When a chance meeting leads to her starting a relationship with Valene Blackwood, one of the most powerful superheroes on the planet. A little too powerful. 

Valene’s powers are slowly driving her mad. Kit sets out to find a way to help Valene, but ends up getting superpowers of her own, and in a duel to the death with Valene’s father, who wants to take over the city. 

I love this book because it’s a unique take on the question of what makes someone a hero, while also looking at how people with privilege respond to marginalized people gaining power, and why some relationships are doomed to fail.

This is a relatively lighthearted superhero romance about Ava, an alien who works as the personal assistant to a big Hollywood star named Gwen. When Gwen asks Ava to pretend to be her girlfriend because it will help Gwen with the custody battle with her ex-husband, all the predictable fake dating shenanigans ensue.

The book is a fun, comfortable read with a good bit of pining, a fun sister relationship, and an interesting superhero plot.

The focus on Ava’s and Gwen’s emotional journey through the story makes it an engaging read the first time through, and a nice, comfortable reread for those days when you just want to lose yourself in a comfy book.

Forging Hephaestus is a fantastic book about a tenuous treaty between superheroes and villains in a four-color world.

Hephaestus AKA Tori Rivas is a new supervillain and is learning the ropes from the most powerful one of them all, Fornax. Fornax is a lot nicer guy than you'd expect from the most terrifying of all villains, which shows this world is a lot more complicated than it seems.

I love the complexity, deep characterization, and thickness of this book. It’s over six hundred pages and full of fantastic details about a complicated but believable superhero world. By the end, I wanted to read a dozen more giant-sized volumes.

Years ago, Jane Maxwell created a comic book series about a group of superheroes, using herself and her friends as inspiration. Now, she’s pulled into a parallel universe to stand in for the missing Superhero version of herself from the comic. 

This is an amazing book with a nice, twisty plot that keeps you guessing. Jane starts the story still mourning the death of her wife, only to find herself confronted with the parallel universe version of her, and all of the emotions that stir up.

I love all the twists that come with this plot, and how real Jane’s emotions feel throughout the whole story.

Like a lot of people, I read The Great Gatsby in high school. I really loved it, which is why I was thrilled when one of my favorite authors did her own fantasy re-imaging of this classic.

The Chosen and the Beautiful is set in an alternate universe where magic flows as easily as champagne. It centers on Jordan Baker, a side character in the original book, and reimagines her as a Vietnamese orphan who was adopted as a baby into a wealthy white family.

I loved how this book managed to take a classic and cast it in a totally new light: it makes you think about who and what gets left out of the history books.   

You gotta give props to Flewelling, who wrote a fantasy series with queer male protags in 1996! Just imagine – before Will & Grace, before Queer as Folk, before gay marriage was even a thing, she had the courage to write this deeply moving spy espionage fantasy book and the relationship between the noble rogue Seregil and his mentee/lover Alec was basically what I used as a model for every romantic relationship in my life. Also, the protag in my first two books was named Alek. Coincidence? I think not.

Superheroes and zombies seem like a terrible combination, but Peter Clines makes a fascinating story of zombies destroying the Earth but for a collection of superhero guarded survivors.

It's a bit like The Walking Dead combined with the Justice League, though the power level of the people involved is closer to Marvel's street level. The first book has some crass jokes that get dropped from the sequels but not enough that I didn't enjoy it. I have to say my favorite characters are Saint George (a Superman analog) and Stealth (a female Batman).