Metal From Heaven by august clarke burst onto the scene late in 2024 and seemed to be in everyone’s mouth by the time Best of the Year lists started rolling around. That said, I’m pretty far outside the intended audience, and the blurb didn’t make it sound like something I’d especially enjoy, so I initially let it pass me by. But the continued hype and the promise of a buddy read after a friend had it selected by her book club finally nudged me to give it a try. And while the buddy read certainly made the whole experience more pleasant, I really struggled to understand the hype.
Metal From Heaven opens with a labor strike, prompted by factory workers discovering that regularly working with the ubiquitous ichorite has led to offspring with violent ichorite allergies who can hardly stand to live in industrial society. But the strike is brutally cut down, and the young lead barely escapes with her life, fleeing the city with a vow to return and kill the tycoon responsible. Soon after, she falls in with a group of revolutionary-minded brigands and grows up robbing the occasional train and preparing for her role in the impersonation of nobility that keeps their enclave hidden, in addition to her long-term assassination goals.
Two things immediately jump out about Metal From Heaven: an absolute gut-punch of an opening scene and a prose style that goes all in on the visceral. The former immediately made me reconsider my initial trepidation, setting the tone for the story to come and violently establishing the anti-capitalist theme. The latter didn’t hit nearly so well. From what I’ve read of the blurbs and positive reviews, the prose is generally considered a selling point, and I know that response to prose is sufficiently idiosyncratic that I can understand it being a selling point for someone else even if it doesn’t click for me. But it’s an extreme style, lush almost to the point of parody, that often kept me focusing on the words themselves and at an emotional distance from the story.
The emotional distance was not helped by the pacing, which I see as one of the book’s biggest flaws. The first half of the book covers the lead’s entire adolescence into adulthood and a burgeoning career in a gang of motorcycle bandits, but it does so in only seven or eight chapters, lurching forward from vignette to vignette—many, though not all, heavy on the action—without a lot of connective tissue to really drive emotional investment in the characters or story. It’s enough to get a sense of the lead’s anger, violence, sexual preferences, and religion, but the side characters are very lightly sketched and there’s not a lot in the way of story progression.
The pacing changes drastically in the third quarter, when the lead is thrust into a high-stakes competition for the hand of an heiress, a competition which serves both as a way to protect her community and to get close to the man she’s sworn to kill. But even as the time skips slow down, it still feels a bit like scattered vignettes, with some frontloaded political discussion that mostly takes a backseat to sexual encounters with bachelorettes with particularly violent tastes. Despite taking place in a more compressed timeframe, it feels more like an interlude than something done in service of the main plot.
The final quarter does settle back down into the main plot arc, bringing it quickly to climax before finishing with a chapter that speedruns the aftermath in a way that feels almost like Cliff’s Notes. The book is very clear about its major themes, but it never seems quite sure of what story it wants to highlight, leading to wildly inconsistent pacing and a disjointed reading experience.
But an even bigger criticism than the pacing is the demands on the reader’s suspension of disbelief. The gang of bandits is idealized and probably more politically effective than they ought to be, but that’s easy enough to overlook in a book that’s clearly setting them in stark contrast to exploitative capitalists. This isn’t a book that’s here to be messy and thematic–at least not on that particular theme–it’s here to be a polemic.
But it also establishes the mainstream society to be homophobic, and then proceeds to introduce lesbians with extreme kinks as heirs to myriad political or business titles, with seemingly no opposition from the stodgy older generation. It feels like an attempt to tackle the theme of homophobia while also introducing more and more characters with which to revel in violent, kinky queer sexuality without any real bridging of the two elements. Like in the first half of the story, the secondary characters are lightly sketched—they’re mostly just there for the steam. At one point, a key secondary character states “this is a clown orgy,” and it honestly sums up my feelings about a good chunk of the book. At one point, immediately after an extended sex scene with some blood play involved, a different character explains the political situation while stepping on the lead’s chest. Is it online to the point of self-parody? It read that way to me. My suspension of disbelief was shattered and then. . . well, stepped on.
Between my critiques of the pacing and the demands on the reader, there wasn’t much chance I’d be able to understand the parade of glowing reviews. But there are a couple elements that do genuinely work very well. The capitalist villainy is thoroughly and viscerally established, and there’s plenty of critique of the way that elite feminism perpetuates oppression as long as they can get some sexually liberated women into positions of power. Metal From Heaven doesn’t pull its thematic punches, and more than one of them land. But the thematic work isn’t good enough to make up for some fairly glaring flaws. There are powerful scenes here, but they’re just not stitched together effectively, resulting in a chaotic jumble trying to be a novel.
Can I use it for Bingo? It’s hard mode for LGTQIA Protagonist and Down with the System. It is also a Book Club choice.
Overall rating: 9 of Tar Vol’s 20. Two stars on Goodreads.