“The Womb of Uncreated Night”
Author: Chris Antonides
Let me begin by saying I truly enjoyed reading this book. “The Womb of Uncreated Night” by Chris Antonides is a fictional story and is extremely well written. I first decided to read it because I was intrigued by the concept. A seventeen-year-old boy with extremely poor eyesight and a love of bats believes himself to be Bruce Wayne aka “Batman.” In the opening chapter we meet the “Brewster” out for a spin in his shiny new Batmobile; test driving it so that in future he can cruise the city streets at night ready to right any wrongs. Unfortunately he winds up getting into an accident and the next thing we know Batman is being incarcerated. How would you like to be the officer radioing your precinct about that arrest? I’m sorry… You’ve got WHO in custody?
Some of you may be wondering what’s so great about a story with a kid who thinks he’s a comic book super-hero. There are probably other books written with similar themes so why would you want to read this one? Well, Antonides decided to throw a little something extra into the mix. Brewster’s girlfriend is attacked in Central Park and when he finds her body it appears as if she’s been bitten by a bat. Or worse and even more unbelievable…a vampire. This book is kind of like “Batman Begins” meets Anne Rice’s vampires and let’s just throw in someone like Sigmund Freud so we can have some scintillating conversation between Brewster’s psychiatrist and our obviously crazy yet genius boy wonder. Of course at the end of each of these court required sessions both psychiatrist and reader will be wondering how deluded our hero actually is.
Antonides did a great job of explaining how things like the batcave came to be. I marveled at the ease in which the infamous batsuit came to fruition and I laughed at the image of Brewster hanging from the ceiling by his feet. Did I mention he literally fell out of his boots the first time he tried it? As an aside, I bet Lionel Richie would have loved a pair of those boots when he made his “Dancing on the Ceiling” video…
Lastly, the author seems very knowledgeable about world history and the arts. This gives a credibility to his writing style and makes the story that much more believable. All in all it was a great book. I definitely enjoyed the read and I highly recommend it.