THE SUPERNATURALIST

In the future’s Satellite City, where everything’s controlled by an enormous satellite, a plot-twisting adventure includes supernatural creatures, a disenfranchised band of Supernaturalists, and abundant use of futuristic weapons. Fourteen-year-old Cosmo escapes from an orphanage that uses boys as medical and commercial lab rats and meets three people racing around rooftops on a mission. The mission: electrically zapping ghostlike blue creatures at accident scenes before the creatures drain people’s life force. Stefan is the leader, Mona the mechanic, and Ditto—a 28-year-old genetic experiment with a six-year-old’s body—the medic. Character motivations often serve plot and exposition, but the action is nonstop. Most memorable are the corporate and police structures and weapons (including a slug shot that wraps its victim instantly in cellophane, requiring a vat of acid for removal) and the intriguing, philosophically elusive nature of the blue supernatural creatures. (Science fiction. 10-14)