Metal from Heaven by August Clarke
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Sapphic MC, multiple lesbian secondary characters
PoV: First-person, past-tense
Published on: 22nd October 2024
ISBN: 1645660990
Goodreads

For fans of  The Princess Bride and Gideon the Ninth: a bloody  lesbian revenge tale and political fantasy set in a glittering world transformed by industrial change – and simmering class warfare.

He who controls ichorite controls the world.

A malleable metal more durable than steel, ichorite is a toxic natural resource fueling national growth, and ambitious industrialist Yann Chauncey helms production of this miraculous ore. Working his foundry is an underclass of destitute workers, struggling to get better wages and proper medical treatment for those exposed to ichorite’s debilitating effects since birth.

One of those luster-touched victims, the child worker Marney Honeycutt, is picketing with her family and best friend when a bloody tragedy unfolds. Chauncey’s strikebreakers open fire.

Only Marney survives.

A decade later, as Yann Chauncey searches for a suitable political marriage for his ward, Marney sees the perfect opportunity for revenge. With the help of radical bandits and their stolen wealth, she must masquerade as an aristocrat to win over the calculating Gossamer Chauncey and kill the man who slaughtered her family and friends. But she is not the only suitor after Lady Gossamer’s hand, leading her to play twisted elitist games of intrigue. And Marney’s luster-touched connection to the mysterious resource and its foundry might put her in grave danger—or save her from it.

H. A. Clarke’s adult fantasy debut, writing as August Clarke, Metal from Heaven is a punk-rock murder ballad tackling labor issues and radical empowerment against the relentless grind of capitalism.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Highlights

~the strangest metal you’ve ever met
~unexpected otters
~the life of a highwaywoman is the life
~service-top MC ftw
~I’m an anarchist now and I’m not sorry

:I also reviewed Metal From Heaven over on Ancillary Review of Books. That review is more spoilery than this one!:

Metal From Heaven grabs you by the throat with the very first line, and doesn’t let go until long after the last.

I still have bruises. I am scarred where this book touched me; I am branded.

And I am so, so good with that.

Metal From Heaven is a feral, phantasmagoric fantasy with bloody knuckles and otherworldly oil between its teeth, an anarchist bacchanal as sharp as it is gorgeous, hot pink and vicious. It’s almost impossibly vivid, every detail jewelled and gleaming, every line a decadent feast, electric and crackling. It’s an iridescent lightning strike, and you’ll find clarke’s prose seared like Lichtenberg figures across your skin before it’s done.

My blood was thick and vibrant. Cut me and find grenadine. Cut me and find white hot light.

The blurb has the plot covered pretty well: Marney’s family and community are all murdered for a peaceful work strike by Chauncey, the man who discovered and discovered how to utilise ichorite, a weird metal that can be used for almost anything. He didn’t care about his workers; they protested; he had them killed. Marney falls in with bandits; grows up; and eventually masquerades as a noble to get close to Chauncey’s daughter, with the goal of killing Chauncey. And – because where would the story be if they didn’t? – things get complicated.

I understood that we had a future of incomprehensible beauty. I just lacked the words for it then.

But even before we get to the plot, the structure of Metal From Heaven is already unusual. The opening lines are spoken from the end of the story;

Know I adore you. Look out over the glow. The cities sundered, their machines inverted, mountains split and prairies blazing, that long foreseen Hereafter crowning fast.

What’s a Hereafter? Who is adored? What’s happening?

What’s happening is Marney telling her story. To us, but not really us. To one person in particular.

Marney survives her family’s massacre, and a single moment of careless, casual kindness – a stranger, not just feeding her, but feeding her the kind of dessert she’s never beheld before – hooks her fate in with that of the Choir: anarchist communists who steal from the rich to support their own hidden community in the far-off Fingerbluffs. They are Hereafterists (does that ring a bell?), working towards paradise on earth (the Hereafter) with every breath, defiantly discarding the constrictions of religion, gender, sexuality, and anything else that seeks to restrain them.

And it’s absolutely beautiful.

We leaned off our lurchers and gave luxurious silks and fine jewels to everyone who gathered to watch us pass, and the crooked teeth they showed us were beautiful, and the air was perfumed with marmalade and tobacco flowers, and Harlow and Sisphe and I reclined on the cliffs like natural princes, eating fruit and sunning ourselves, adorned with scrapes and bruises.

We’re supposed to be hypnotised by the Fingerbluffs, and I don’t know how anyone could fail to be: it’s a dream, a Kubla Khan of a place where everyone is free to be who they want; where children wear jewels and buying-and-selling is just for fun. But like Kubla Khan, it dissolves like candyfloss when you try to hold it. clarke never zooms in to show us the complicated, messy bits that come with giving society the finger – and this doesn’t feel like clarke being forgetful; it reads as very deliberate. We’re supposed to raise our eyebrows at Marney’s blithe assurance that the Hereafter will be perfect, even though she can’t articulate what that means, never mind how it could be manifested. I’m pretty confident that we’re meant to give a head-tilt at the fact that the Fingerbluffs couldn’t exist without capitalism living next door to steal from – how are the Fingerbluffs going to support themselves in a world with no more rich?

Unclear.

But I can be sure that it’s deliberate because clarke never drops the ball with his worldbuilding. In Metal From Heaven, they’ve created a rich world so fully-realised you’ll forget it’s fictional, dazzlingly embroidered with history, competing religions, fashions, gender roles, political structures – nothing has been forgotten, and yet the worldbuilding is never overwhelming. The placement of small, unique details – prayer-pearls, the Bleed, lip-rings, tattoos – infuses the book with the vivid impression of a vast and complicated world, without having to show us every bit of it. Things are close enough to be familiar, with factories and motorcycles and trains, but the tiny elements that remind you that we’re not in our world are like pop rocks candy: glittering and sharp in your mouth, sweet and vital. Battered bread, domesticated otters, blue fruit – dazzling, viscerally convincing, and completely side-stepping any need for info-dumps.

Two hundred years ago Ignavian revolutionaries had decided it was unjust to have a class-based truth tense and hearsay tense, that is, it was a moral injury for the poor not to be taught truth’s grammar, for everything a working man said to be assumed to be half figment, for the privileged to be the authority on all things.

Marney herself is a feral tangle of desire and trauma, sharp as broken glass and soft as fur. She’s the kind of fearless whose courage comes from having already written herself off, and good gods she is fucked-up. The biggest critique I have of the Hereafterists is that none of them saw baby!Marney desperately needed healing – but then, just about everyone else among the Hereafterists is broken, too, so maybe there was no one whole enough to help her. Either way, Marney is a fascinating main character; oddly passive in some ways, fervent in her beliefs but uninterested in the nitty-gritty of them, quick to self-sacrifice, uneasy with her body and gender, vicious, rabid. She’s only a few steps above illiterate, which is interesting in a genre where leads are usually supernaturally special; she’s a wild thing who loves softness and luxury and femininity; who wants to make people happy as much as she wants to murder her family’s murderer; who has no pride at all. I adore her.

It was a disjuncture in the meat of me. A bone-deep fear. That fear was hungry, it wanted, I wanted, I lusted and was satisfied. Just not with hands on me. It sometimes seemed to me I had a cuntless cockless body. I was nothing but output and appetite, I gave, my pleasure lived in my knuckles and my nail beds and the leather belts around my hips. My clit was my tongue. My slit was my throat.

So what’s this book about? Yes, we know the plot, the plot is in the blurb, but what is it about?

Metal From Heaven is gender-fuckery and untamed queerness, labour politics and workers’ rights, anti-capitalist and gloriously anarchist. What the fuck is femininity weaves through the story, a bright, hot pink ribbon with razored edges. Pink, pink is everywhere: pink is the colour of gender-fuckery, as we see when Amon paints his face not blue for men or black for women, but pink; pink is what Marney sees when she uses her magic, the world smearing and shining around her. This is political fantasy – fiercely, unabashedly political – where there’s nothing on the menu but the rich, the rich and those who’ll betray everyone else to serve them.

Our fight was with the above and those below who’d betray their comrades to get higher.

clarke is writing about violence and freedom and sex and kink, the unceasing fight to make the world better, the belief that it can be better. Hope, and what hope costs. It’s gritty and gorgeous in equal measure, deliriously sensual, sexual; it has no interest in genre conventions at all, doesn’t ignore your expectations so much as never recognises that they’re there in the first place. It’s intoxicating and addictive – I have read my advanced reading copy THREE TIMES now, and I will read it many more times, I don’t see how I could ever be done.

And the prose? I highlighted so many lines and passages that I broke my ereader, and I have a long, long list of sentences I need tattooed on me. I have FEASTED on the prose here and I am FED, my word-hunger has never been so satisfied in my LIFE. I already adored clarke’s writing – hells yes I did, and if you haven’t read the Scapegracers trilogy, you bloody well ought to – but my siblings in Satan, the only way I can put this is, Metal From Heaven is the opposite of a lobotomy.

In more ways than one: yes, I galaxy-brained at the painfully exquisite language, but also: this book radicalised me. I’ve been anti-capitalist for a while now, but hi, yes, I’m convinced, anarchist communism is the way to go. Not because the Hereafterists are perfect, but because clarke fucking convinced me that too many of the tenets I’ve taken for granted are an outrage, an unforgivable violence. And I’m eager to see what other readers think, if anyone else has been convinced, and if so, where do we go from here?

When few rule the many, they must use force to take what they want, and demonstrate force not just to keep it, but to snuff the fires of contradiction from the collective. People above must do this. This is a quality of being above. Someone must be below, and to be below is to be bereft and suffer.

How often does a book really blow your mind? Really teach you something new, really make you see the world in a different way? NOT OFTEN. Mostly the books we love already align with our own beliefs and views – yes they do, don’t deny it – but every now and then, one comes along like a taser, and it’s going to hurt but the shock jolts you wide awake.

This book is a taser.

It was not intuition, it was insanity and faith.

When you put everything together, plot and worldbuilding and stunning main character and themes and prose–! This BOOK, this book is a nonpareil, a crown jewel, a comet that sears through the skies once in a generation. It is an Event and a miracle and a war-cry, ornate and bloody, decadent and distilled, a glamour bomb reshaping the world. It’s like nothing else you’ve ever read in so many different ways.

I bear my scars from reading it proudly.

Keep me and save us. Keep me or I’ll kill you. Say you’ll keep me.”

“I’ll keep you.”

Metal From Heaven doesn’t play nice and doesn’t play fair; this is a book that challenges you, bites you, wants you awake and wild and bleeding light. No review can do it justice; this is one you have to experience.

If you read only one book this year, let it be this one. You will not regret it.

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