In a world where superheroes are real, Fatale, cyborg warrior and newest member of superteam the Champions, must stop the plans of villian Doctor Impossible. Doctor Impossible is an unstable mastermind, currently imprisoned in a high-security facility. He spends his days in a reverie, thinking of his past as a misunderstood young prodigy and villainous adult. His routine is interrupted when he finds out that CoreFire, his arch-rival, has vanished. The mad scientist takes advantage of the mistakes of a pair of rookie superheroes that have come to interrogate him and escapes.
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Fatale is a cyborg with no memory of her life prior to the accident which led to her current state. After working as a Special Forces operative, she has decided to enter the superhero racket as a freelancer. Her minor successes have won her the opportunity to try out for the latest incarnation of the the world's foremost super team, the Champions. As she joins the team and meets her idols, she begins to discover, to her horror, that the men and women held up as exemplars to the world are in fact only people, and as flawed and broken as her.
On the run from the law, Doctor Impossible begins assembling the ingredients to his latest plan for world conquest. He seeks to acquire a variety of items from other heroes and villains, including a mirror, a doll, a gem, and a hammer. While he goes about this, flashbacks reveal his past as an obsessive graduate student whose experiments in "Zeta" force led to a laboratory explosion, creating CoreFire, the most powerful man on Earth, from Impossible's long-time rival, uber-jock Jason. As Jason begins dating Impossible's love interest, journalism student Erica, the scientist becomes increasingly unhinged and fixated on giving himself superpowers to pursue a career in costumed villainy.
As the Doctor chases down the exotic ingredients of his latest scheme, the Champions chase him down. Fatale goes along with them. As they do so, we learn, via flashbacks and a description of a documentary film, about the history of the super team. We also find out one of Fatale's greatest secrets: the mysterious program that reassembled her as a high-tech warrior vanished shortly after creating her, leaving her in the dark as to her own origins and purpose. Fatale becomes close to her teammate Lily, a time traveler, reformed super-villain, and former girlfriend of Doctor Impossible.
The Doctor assembles his device, a machine intended to move the Earth off its orbit in order to radically alter weather patterns, allowing Impossible to rule a newly-icy planet. The Champions move to stop him, but, using a powerful magical hammer, the Doctor is able to defeat and imprison them; in the process, it is revealed that Fatale is actually the castoff product of a forgotten experiment by Impossible. Then CoreFire returns from his extended absence. However, the might of the hammer is enough to allow the Doctor to overcome even his greatest foe. The mad scientist chains his fallen rival and attempts to gloat, revealing his secret history with the hero, only to discover that the fickle superman has no memory of his youthful rival or the girl that drove Impossible's thirst for revenge.
Lily, who has walked away from the Champions by this point, arrives late to the fight. She subdues the Doctor, whose hammer has run out of energy, and reveals a secret of her own: she is actually Erica, the young journalist that Doctor Impossible pined for and CoreFire dated. After an accident transformed her into a superhuman being, she reinvented herself as a fake time traveler and villain, constantly disappointed at how the two men in her life failed to remember or recognize her. She stops the Doctor's plan and walks off, leaving the Champions to clean up the mess.
As Doctor Impossible is hauled off, the Champions celebrate. But the Doctor already has a new plan. The novel ends with the scientist beginning to formulate another scheme, thinking ahead to the moment where he makes his escape and tries again to conquer the world.
Best part of story, including ending:
Austin Grossman, much like his twin brother Lev, takes a genre typically aimed at young readers (superheroes in this case) and applies the layer of literary fiction to it, deconstructing the urges behind these stories in the process. Invincible is a deep, thoughtful, and intriguing meditation on heroism and villainy.
Best scene in story:
The climactic confrontation scene, in which Lily reveals her real identity to Doctor Impossible and CoreFire, caps off the book's themes nicely.
Opinion about the main character:
Both Doctor Impossible and Fatale share a melancholy and patina of failure that make them eminently relateable.
