This summer’s hotly anticipated superhero movie that doesn’t involve a dark knight gets an early novelization in IRON MAN. Author Peter David is no stranger to these things – neither to comics nor adaptations of flicks based on those comics – so you’re in good hands for the short time it takes to read, which is just slightly longer than the film’s running time.

Tony Stark is the kind of multimillionaire you really love to hate, meaning that besides being filthy stinking rich, he’s obscenely lucky with super-hot women. He deals in the industry of designing and selling weapons of war, and ironically, it’s this success that nearly brings about his demise.

While in Afghanistan to sell units of a brilliant, newfangled missile he’s created, his U.S. convoy is the victim of a terrorist attack – explosives in the road that send Humvees flying. He escapes from the site, but awakens as a captor of the insurgents. He has shrapnel hovering dangerously close to his heart, but this is kept in check by a rather sick-sounding plot device: a large magnetic doodad now placed into a depression in his chest.

The only reason he’s being kept alive like that? So he can build the bad guys some of those nifty, high-tech weapons. He agrees. He lies. Instead, he makes himself a primitive suit of armor with jerry-rigged surprises – flamethrower, anyone? – so he can skedaddle his way to safety.

His plan works so well that when he gets back on American soil, he makes a bigger and better one – namely, the red and gold suit we’ve come to know and love, that makes him Iron Man. He also thanks his lucky stars and has a change of heart concerning his career, announcing that effective immediately, Stark Industries is out of the weapons biz.

Naturally, this news doesn’t sit well with the board, and a whole new war is waged on Iron Man’s home turf.

IRON MAN moves fast, structured like a screenplay with short chapters and bursts of action. It’s easy to envision Robert Downey Jr. delivering all of Stark’s lines, too, especially since the early chapters appear to have lifted all the ones you’ve heard in the well-received trailers. How closely it mirrors the finished product remains to be seen (if you’re judging solely by this, don’t hold your breath for that Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury cameo), but it bodes well for the film regardless.

The only thing David does that’s odd is switch to present tense for all of the scenes from Stark’s POV; it’s unnecessary. And Stark’s early escape is too protracted, while the requisite final showdown is a bit rushed. But the author is quite skilled at making IRON MAN read like a “real” novel if the movie didn’t exist. Even with a strong anti-war theme, it delivers the thrills, even if David may not be responsible for the actual plot. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• MARVEL 1602: FANTASTICK FOUR by Peter David
• MARVEL ADVENTURES SPIDER-MAN VOL. 5: MONSTERS ON THE PROWL by Peter David and Mike Norton
• SPIDER-MAN 3 by Peter David
• PSI-MAN: DEATHSCAPE by Peter David