Metal from Heaven by August Clarke
Apr. 26th, 2025 02:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsMetal from Heaven
4/5. Where do I even start? The problem is, attempting to describe this book will make it sound like something you have read before, and I assure you that is incorrect. An industrial fantasy about labor rights and queerness in which our narrator survives a massacre of her factory-working family who dared to strike for better working conditions, including some help for what the fantasy metal they are working with is doing to their kids.
This book has the distinction of containing more lesbians by volume than anything else I’ve ever read. And they’re all—
I was about to say that they are all feral. Which they are. But it would be truer to say that this whole book is feral. It will eat your ideas of good narrative structure and spit out the bones. It is absolutely ungovernable. Punk without the self-consciousness. Bloody and messy and incredibly queer. If you try and shove this book’s ideas of gender or sexuality into a box, the box will implode.
Challenging, frustrating, interesting, different. A giant splatter of a book. A roar of a book. It does revenge and industrial fantasy and fantasy of manners and queer liberation, and there’s a whole section in the middle that gives big Gideon the Ninth vibes. Is it good? I mean, yes, but also no, but also you are asking the wrong question.
Anyway, I liked it, though I suspect this one will be divisive.
Content notes: A lot of violence.
4/5. Where do I even start? The problem is, attempting to describe this book will make it sound like something you have read before, and I assure you that is incorrect. An industrial fantasy about labor rights and queerness in which our narrator survives a massacre of her factory-working family who dared to strike for better working conditions, including some help for what the fantasy metal they are working with is doing to their kids.
This book has the distinction of containing more lesbians by volume than anything else I’ve ever read. And they’re all—
I was about to say that they are all feral. Which they are. But it would be truer to say that this whole book is feral. It will eat your ideas of good narrative structure and spit out the bones. It is absolutely ungovernable. Punk without the self-consciousness. Bloody and messy and incredibly queer. If you try and shove this book’s ideas of gender or sexuality into a box, the box will implode.
Challenging, frustrating, interesting, different. A giant splatter of a book. A roar of a book. It does revenge and industrial fantasy and fantasy of manners and queer liberation, and there’s a whole section in the middle that gives big Gideon the Ninth vibes. Is it good? I mean, yes, but also no, but also you are asking the wrong question.
Anyway, I liked it, though I suspect this one will be divisive.
Content notes: A lot of violence.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-02 08:18 pm (UTC)at some point when we actually get together I want to talk to you about this one. I got really far into this one before I stopped, and I couldn't tell if I gave up because I have 2025-brain and was unable to keep track of who all the multiply-named, sometimes disguised girls women were. But I might have given up because I didn't like anybody? I've lost some real book and TV opportunities because I have to like at least one character; it's amazing to me that I've read thousands of pages of Robin Hobb when her characters are all so shitty.
But also I really wanted so much more of the narrative itself, and I might try again someday. I was not expecting the rich girls to have complexities of class and queerness and power.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-03 05:00 pm (UTC)Hm yeah this is not so much a liking anybody book. Which usually is a problem for me, too. And yet in this instance, I was sufficiently carried along by the absolute mess that is this book -- structurally and spiritually -- that I just went with it.
Also, you are welcome to come for the weekend anytime. It doesn't have to be summer. We are going to make it up your way eventually, but likely not for a couple of years.