Creatures of the night are hunting Gotham's elite. Bruce Wayne is your new target. Bruce Wayne is about to turn 18 and inherit his family's fortune, beyond the control of Wayne Industries. However, on his birthday, he makes an impulsive choice and is sentenced to community service at Arkham Asylum, a mix of prison and psychiatric hospital where the city's most deranged criminals are held. There he meets Madeleine, a member of the Creatures of the Night, a radical group that wants to wipe out Gotham's elite. Until then, the girl refused to confess her crimes or inform the police about the future attacks they were planning, but she decides to open up to Bruce Wayne, starting a dangerous game of seduction and intelligence. Will young Wayne be able to convince her to reveal all her secrets or is she just manipulating him to ruin Gotham? As the Creatures of the Night's final blow approaches, Bruce realizes he's not all that different from Madeleine. And, even far from becoming the Dark Knight, he'll need to prove he's prepared to stop one of the biggest threats Gotham has ever seen.
I'm not a fan of hero-based books. Most of these adaptations fail to fully explore the psyche of the characters, limiting themselves to the hero facing a known or unknown villain where we are sure that nothing will happen to the protagonist.
And bringing a novel based on one of DC's most thought-provoking characters is not such a simple task.
Marie Lu managed to make a short and exciting story presenting part of Bruce Wayne's past and showing that it was no accident that he would become one of the greatest detectives in the world.
The concepts presented in the plot range from a young Bruce still naive, but already with a mind and bodies almost ready to become the Dark Knight in a few years.
It's not a version of Batman Year One, but it manages to bring out all the sadness and pain of a Bruce Wayne struggling to be more than an heir to an empire, but at the same time realizing that he really is all of that.
The book still brings parts of a character that we have much more empathy for in his attitudes and who he is. This is a different Bruce Wayne than many fans are used to, with a dour, cold and calculating character.
Here he still has friends and hopes to bring security to his city in a different way than he will in the future.
The atmosphere of the city and especially the Asylum are dark and we realized how much until then there was no definition of the characteristics of the hospice/prison in the comics. It's like the batcave, where each artist imagines it in a way that is often so strange, that we wonder, how did Bruce and Alfred manage by themselves to bring so many threads to feed it all?
At least in the book the description is more believable, giving architectural details and other simpler ones where our imagination completes the parts that matter. Even so, Marie Lu delivers an Asylum that goes beyond the madness of its occupants, leaving us claustrophobic and afraid of every corner of this place.
Batman Creatures of the Night is one of the best adventures for new and old fans of the bat, for bringing a simple and short story, but exciting and full of information of who will one day become one of the greatest heroes of the DC universe.
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