You've heard of superheroes, seen them flying across the sky, destroying great swaths of cities and ending countless innocent lives in order to defeat great evils and world-spanning threats and sell lots of sponsorships and merchandising opportunities.

This is a story about the guy that is not those heroes. A supervillain in a world where making the right friends and political contacts is what separates the good guys from the bad.

The Alchemyst is a story about a normal guy in a crazy world that spends his time trying to follow his dreams and conscience, working on new potions, thinking about girls, and lifting heavy shit, while trying to stay under the radar of the superheroes, supervillains, and governments that want what he can do.

And occasionally turning them into makeshift melee weapons.

If you enjoy The Boys, the Aberrant roleplaying game, Mystery Men, Trashy romances, Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, or SAW you may enjoy this book. Or you might think it doesn't seem like any of those things.

Please note that this book has extremely graphic and sometimes gross fight scenes, heroes as villains, villains as heroes, opinionated and often politically incorrect characters, some graphic sex scenes, dad jokes, dirty jokes, realistic depictions of romance and flirting, bondage and dominance themes, and more than a few cuss words when they are really appropriate.

This is NOT a superhero genre deconstruction. Many heroes truly are heroes, and they don't all need to be destroyed to make a good story, but it does look into the dark side of superpowers and the unreasonable and often contradictory demands placed on exceptional people.

The 'sexual content' tag is well-earned. The profanity tag... well... This isn't Tropic thunder, but there's some cussing. The gore... a teeny bit, but Louis never uses someone's head as a hand puppet (He did at one point, but I wrote it out) There are also hints of other stuff as well, but like a comic book, a good story has lots of elements!