The Ninth Metal by Benjamin Percy

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on June 1, 2021

The Ninth Metal reminded me of the television show Jessica Jones (a show that, like many others, I discovered after Jack Taylor praised it in a Ken Bruen novel). The premise, drawn from a Marvel comic book, is that people have suddenly acquired superhuman abilities. The show succeeds because of the characters’ differing reactions to their unexpected (and sometimes unwanted) powers. Benjamin Percy writes in a note at the end of the novel that he grew up reading comic books, as did I. He apparently intended The Ninth Metal as, in some sense, a tribute to the comic book sensibility. If so, the tribute only partially succeeds, in part because he gives too little attention to the things that matter.

The novel imagines that meteors trailing a comet landed on various parts of the Earth as the planet passed through the comet’s orbit. The meteors change people in different ways — in one part of the world, it turns them into glass, while there are rumors of people flying in another country — but most of those changes are only referenced tangentially. The Ninth Metal is apparently the first book in a series. I imagine that other books will explore other results of the comet’s intersection with Earth. There is a suggestion, mostly in dreams that characters have about tentacles, that the comet might be related to aliens.

Some of the meteors fell in Northfall, Minnesota on land owned by Betsy Gunderson. A kid named Hawkin, whose father has just been killed for reasons Hawkin doesn’t understand, survives the comet strike. Five years later, Hawkin is being held captive in a military facility so that a scientist named Victoria Lennon can study him. Victoria shoots bullets at Hawkin to analyze their negligible effect on him. Victoria has some sympathy for Hawkin but keeps doing her job because she fears that others would be more aggressive in their attempt to kill him. It takes some time before she understands that Hawkin is absorbing the energy from the bullets and that the buildup of absorbed energy is something he will need to unleash.

While Victoria is studying Hawkin, John Frontier returns to Northfall for a family wedding. John’s father owns Frontier Mining, a company that competes with Black Dog Energy. John and Hawkin are a lot alike, although John is concealing his power. John’s crazy sister Talia is at odds with her father, who vowed never to help the military. Talia cares about money more than she cares about her father and is happy to do a deal with the military.

Talia commits a murder that adds nothing to a story that scatters in too many directions to remain cohesive. The portions of the novel that follow a police officer’s search for the missing murder victim, aided by her father, seems divorced from the more consequential story that Percy leaves buried.

Most people in Northfall own land on which the meteors fell, leaving behind deposits of “omnimetal.” Landowners made themselves rich by selling their land to Black Dog or Frontier, but Betsy — whose 400 acres has the mother lode of omnimetal — refuses to sell. The meteors altered her land (a rock formation appeared that resembles a crown) and Betsy is regarded as a priestess by pilgrims who view her land as a religious site. Her followers are largely addicts who snort or smoke omnimetal. They’re called “metal eaters” and they like to use the slogan “Metal Is,” which apparently means something to them. All of that is interesting, but Percy fails to develop that aspect of the plot in enough depth to make a story out of it.

The Northern Minnesota that Percy constructs is more intriguing than the superpowers or the murder that get the bulk of his attention. The “omnimetal” absorbs and releases energy in a way that allows a train fashioned from the metal to generate its own power as it moves along the omnimetal tracks. Omnimetal promises to be “the greatest energy source in the world” and has attracted people to Minnesota in the way that the Gold Rush attracted people to California. The impact of a revolutionary change in energy production is worth exploring in some detail, but Percy ignores that story in favor of developing the rivalry between Frontier and Black Dog. In the real world, a much larger company would swoop down and claim all the ore with the government’s national security blessing, concentrating the wealth in the hands of large corporations rather than owners of local mining companies, but that’s another issue that Percy chose not to address.

The story eventually devolves into a battle between a superhero and a supervillain. The villain’s superpower comes from a high tech “wizard sword” fashioned from omnimetal. That part of the story intentionally mimics epic comic book battles, Hawkin having been shaped by all the Batman comics he has read. While Hawkin explains how Batman’s villains represent the dark side of Bruce Wayne’s personality, the clash contains none of the subtlety that Hawkin found in the accumulated Batman stories.

The Ninth Metal is too ambitious for its own good. Unnecessary subplots and tangents prevent a meaningful story from taking root. The stories of Hawkin and John are underdeveloped, as is the background of omnimetal’s impact on, not just their lives, but the entire world. I appreciated Percy’s clear prose and his love of comic books, but a novel should do more with a story than a 32-page comic can manage. The Ninth Metal does too little by trying to do too much. It barely scratches the surface of the story that Percy apparently meant to tell.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Old Enemy by Henry Porter

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on June 8, 2021

The Old Enemy continues and perhaps concludes the story that began in Firefly. While The Old Enemy is the third book in a series, a reader can enjoy it as a standalone thriller.

The novel begins with the murder of a retired and revered spy named Robert Harland. As death is approaching, Harland manages to leave a message for his wife that identifies his killer. Finding the code that explains the message is one of the many tasks that Harland’s old friend, Paul Samson, eventually undertakes.

Before he learns of Harland’s death, however, Samson is busy protecting Zoe Freemantle, who works for an organization called GreenState. Samson has been assigned that task by Macy Harp, the head of the private intelligence firm that is Samson’s employer. Samson doesn’t know why he’s protecting Freemantle, nor does Freemantle know that Samson has been hired to protect her. She might even think he’s stalking her. Samson only knows that Freemantle seems to have a connection to a building that has attracted the attention of government agencies in Great Britain and elsewhere. As Freemantle approaches that building, someone attacks Samson with a knife, but whether the attacker was targeting Samson or Freemantle is unclear.

As all of that unfolds, Denis Hisami is preparing to give testimony before Congress. Hisami is married to Anastasia Christakos. In an earlier novel, Samson rescued Anastasia from a kidnapping and now carries a torch for her. Hisami is about to reveal a major conspiracy that has reached high levels of government in the US and UK, but he’s poisoned before he reaches that point in his testimony.

Samson initially wonders whether Russians are getting even with all the people who played a role in recovering Anastasia from her kidnappers. The murder of Harland and the attempted murders of Hisami and Samson turn out to be part of a more complicated conspiracy. Samson pieces the conspiracy together with the help of his hacker friend Naji Touma, a resourceful young man Samson rescued in Firefly. Samson finds it difficult to pin down Naji to find out what he knows, a difficulty of intelligence gathering that bedevils Samson throughout the novel.

Despite the conspiracy’s complexity, the reader isn’t likely to get lost. Henry Porter provides internal summaries and other reminders of events that are critical to the plot, including important moments from the first two novels. The plot never becomes convoluted. Porter peppers the plot with action scenes without dumbing down the story. Like most fictional conspiracies, this one is driven by money and power. I’ll give Porter credit for crafting a credible conspiracy, or at least one that is more plausible than a typical Ludlum conspiracy.

I also give Porter credit for creating an interesting character in Paul Samson. He has the kind of tortured personality that makes a spy sympathetic. The plot takes Samson to various settings around the world while making clear that “the old enemy” — Russia — is still the one most likely to make serious trouble for western democracies. I don’t know if he intends to bring back Porter in future novels, but he is a worthy addition to the canon of fictional spies who make espionage fiction so enjoyable.

RECOMMENDED

Alien Day by Rick Wilber

Published by Tor Books on June 1, 2021

Five years after Alien Morning was published, Rick Wilber returns with Alien Day. Alien Morning was a first contact novel. The aliens are the S'hudonni. They look like dolphins, which is a refreshing change from the tendency to imagine that aliens look like lizards or spiders or humans wearing makeup. Other aliens in the S’hudonni empire look like daffodils and ducks. The S’hudonni appear to be benevolent, but bad things happen on Earth before Alien Morning ends. Now Earth is growing grains and grapes and making hand-crafted beer, whiskey, and wine for export to the thirsty S’hudonni empire.

The ambassador/invader from the S’hudonni is known to humans as Twoclicks. He’s the favored son of the S’hudonni empire’s ruler, the one Mother Over All. Twoclicks, or a version of him (a matter transporter makes duplicate copies of whatever it transports) is back on Earth to bring Peter Holman to the S'hudonnir home world, where he is tasked with witnessing and recording peace negotiations. Peter is the primary character in Alien Day, although it doesn’t seem like he will have the chance to make a serious contribution to the story. As Peter is narrating his voyage, the S’hudonni ship is attacked and Peter’s broadcast is cut short. If that were the end of Peter, however, this would be a short novel.

A good part of Alien Day consists of Peter’s narrative account of his adventures among the S’hudonni, including his friendship with Treble (the youngest heir to the throne), and their effort to rescue Peter’s sister Kait, who is being held hostage by Whistle, the ruler’s less favored child. Peter also narrates Kait’s separate adventures as recounted to him by Kait. When Peter isn’t having adventures or writing letters to Earth about his adventures, he has sex with one of the Heathers, who look human during sex but are actually shape-shifting S’hudonni. I’m not a fan of shape-shifting characters (they seem to be popular in romance novels for reasons I can’t fathom) but Heather isn’t a big part of the story.

The plot eventually works its way back to Earth, where Treble gets a tour from Peter’s former-sort-of-girlfriend, actress Chloe Cary, while Peter’s brother Tom encourages anti-alien militias and saboteurs to make trouble for the S’hudonni. Peter apparently represents a political movement although that theme is not well explored. Various attempts to assassinate Treble and/or Chloe and to capture Tom keep the story moving.

Alien Morning was praised for inspiring a sense of wonder. Alien Day trades off the background created in the first novel without adding much that’s news. Middle novels in a trilogy often seem like a bridge, serving the purpose of setting up the third novel without standing alone as a worthwhile story.  The story’s parallel plots  — the struggle between Twoclicks and his brother Whistle for control of Earth’s profits, and the conflict between Peter and the tactics of terrorism adopted by Peter’s brother Tom — seem collateral to the larger story. While there isn’t an abundance of meat in the second novel, Rick Wilber serves readers some tasty action scenes.

Twoclicks is more interesting than the human characters. He comes across as a reality TV star rather than a politician, a star who knows that fame and followers allow a politician to get away with anything. Twoclicks is clearly playing a game of chess, using humans as his pawns, but the purpose of his moves is not yet clear. Readers will need to wait for the third novel to understand the Machiavellian approach that Twoclicks is taking in his relationship with Earth. Given the passage of time between the first and second novels, it might be a long wait.

It’s difficult to rate individual novels in a trilogy because the collective work is what matters. If this novel existed in a vacuum, I might recommend it with reservations. Read as a continuation of the first novel and in anticipation that the final novel will make sense of the whole thing, I’m giving Alien Day a full but guarded recommendation.

RECOMMENDED

Bonnie Jack by Ian Hamilton

Published by House of Anansi Press on June 1, 2021

Bonnie Jack is a throwback to a time when writers created credible characters in conflict and used them to tell a straightforward story. There is nothing postmodernist about Bonnie Jack. As a family drama, the story is a departure from Ian Hamilton’s crime fiction. Yet Hamilton’s Ava Lee books can be read as family dramas, albeit dramas about a crime family, an Asian version of the Sopranos. Although I wouldn’t call it a crime novel, Bonnie Jack does end with a crime, one that creates a moral dilemma for the protagonist, who must decide whether to make a personal sacrifice to help a family that, four days earlier, he didn’t know existed.

As a young man with a degree in accounting, Jack Anderson got a job with an insurance company and worked his way to the top. His competitive style — legal but cutthroat — earned him the name Bloody Jack, a nickname he detests.

With his retirement date looming, Jack is confronting a new and uncertain life. Perhaps that is what motivates him to finally confront a memory of his childhood in Scotland — the memory of his mother taking his sister to the restroom during a movie and never returning. Jack’s father didn’t want him, so Jack was taken to an orphanage. Jack was fortunate to be adopted by a loving American family, but his abandonment shaped his personality. He doesn’t trust easily. He bottles up his pain and doesn’t share it with his family. He carries a huge resentment of his mother and has never understood how she could have left him in the theater.

Jack now has a loving family of his own, but he has never told them that he was adopted. He decides the time has come to reveal his secret. More than that, he wants to travel to Scotland to ask his sister why his mother left him. After overcoming her shock, Jack’s supportive wife Anne agrees to travel to Scotland with him. During the trip, Jack not only finds his sister, but learns that he has two siblings and a niece he never knew about.

Hamilton conveys Jack’s pain without portraying him as a victim. Jack’s sister offers a sympathetic view of Jack’s mother, reminding us that we can’t understand why people behave as they do when we have not walked in their shoes. Jack is too settled into resentment to accept his sister’s perspective. Anne provides an important bridge between the two siblings, reminding them that their different views of their mother should not be the defining fact of their relationship. Anne’s humanity and the bridge she builds becomes an important factor in a critical decision that Jack must make at the novel’s end.

Jack goes through a tough week in Scotland, particularly after he learns that his father is still alive. A confrontation with his father leads to police involvement. News of the minor scandal makes its way to Jack’s board of directors, creating another stressor in his life. Jack doesn’t handle every conflict as well as he might. But then, neither did his parents. Neither do most people.

Bonnie Jack employs a simple, fast-moving plot to tell a morally complex tale. Toward the novel’s end, Jack is faced with a difficult decision that will test his character, the kind of decision that asks the reader to wonder “What would I do?” Hamilton uses Jack to remind the reader that most people are inclined toward selfishness and self-absorption, traits they need to overcome to realize their full potential as human beings. Hamilton doesn’t preach or pontificate, but in the time-honored tradition of novelists, he illustrates how hard decisions are a test of moral fiber. Readers who are looking for a throwback novel by a skilled storyteller should give Bonnie Jack a try.

RECOMMENDED

Double Blind by Edward St. Aubyn

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 1, 2021

Philosophy, genetics, and mental illness are the building blocks of Double Blind. They rest on the foundation of family, the anchor of all Edward St. Aubyn’s work.

If it is about anything, Double Blind is about relationships. Nature is the setting that informs those relationships — in particular, a country estate called Howorth that has been given over to wilding. If we lived in a state of nature like the deer in Howorth, copulating freely and without attachment might be the natural thing to do. Perhaps it is the natural thing for humans to do when they are not in a relationship, but after relationships form, natural behavior could be too destructive to contemplate. That’s the philosophical question that confounds Francis, whose job is to give tours of Howorth while monitoring the resurgence of species.

Francis’ girlfriend is a biologist named Olivia. Notwithstanding Olivia’s pregnancy, Francis is tempted by Hope’s repeated offers of sex, beginning when they swim together in the nude. Nudity should be natural for Francis. He’s a naturalist who is restoring the cultivated fields of Howorth to their natural state. Nudity seems to be Hope’s preferred state — she sheds her clothing whenever she’s alone with Francis — making temptation, in the form of “grasping at Hope,” a force of nature that Francis struggles to resist.

Another key relationship involves Olivia’s friend Lucy Russell, whose bright future is threatened by a brain tumor. A venture capitalist and fund manager named Hunter Sterling persuaded Lucy to move to London and run a venture capital firm that focuses on science and technology. Since the offer gave Lucy an excuse to leave her rich American boyfriend, not much persuasion was needed. Lucy agrees to stay in Hunter’s London flat while she’s getting situated. Hunter is usually elsewhere, indulging in his cocaine-fueled life of megalomania. Hunter’s “love of power and money had acted as a proxy for love itself” until Lucy gave him cause to alter his perspective.

The final relationship of importance involves Olivia’s adoptive father. Martin Carr is a psychotherapist whose fascination with a schizophrenic patient named Sebastian pushes him toward his ethical boundaries when he begins to suspect that Sebastian, who was also adopted, might be related to Olivia.

An odd but amusing subplot involves the Catholic Church’s relationship with Lucy and Hunter. Lucy is developing a project called Brainwaves. The project scans the brains of people who are in a desirable state of mind and attempts to reconstruct those states in others using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation. A Cardinal has tasked a Franciscan Abbot named Father Guido with making money from a brain scan of “the greatest mystic of modern time.” Using Brainwaves technology, the church plans to market a helmet that will stimulate the mystical centers of the brain by replicating the mystic’s brainwaves. Father Guido provides some comic moments as encounters and inadvertently enjoys a world that is foreign to his ascetic life.

When St. Aubyn isn’t developing relationships, his characters indulge in far-ranging discussions about the mind and the natural world. They talk about mental illness and genetics, the efficacy of psychotherapy, the relationship between socioeconomic status and the mental health diagnosis one is likely to be given, theories surrounding the development of consciousness, the nature of science (“Science is a subset of human nature and not the other way around,” Hunter opines), the tension between determinism and freedom, and the potential of immunotherapy as a cure for cancer. St. Aubyn advances a number of interesting thoughts, including the semantic use of “side effect” to “pretend that among the range of pharmaceutical effects caused by a medicine the undesirable ones were somehow incidental.” I also liked the notion that “experience accuses science of being reductionist and authoritarian, while science dismisses experience as subjective, anecdotal, and self-deceived.”

St. Aubyn tosses out dozens of well-formed thought pearls, many of which would make intriguing essays, but can they sustain a novel? The plot scatters its threads, never weaving them into a tight story. Digressive paragraphs about population biology and genetics go on for pages, interrupting any momentum toward telling a story.

The characters generate enough family drama to sustain two or three novels, but the drama gets lost in the swirl of ideas that St. Aubyn uses as a substitute for storytelling. The plot eventually reaches what seems like an arbitrary stopping point, leaving every thread dangling. The result is disappointing. Working intellectual intrigue into a plot is always welcome, but not at the expense of abandoning the plot, as if the writer realized that none of the stories he started were really worth telling.

And maybe they aren't. Francis' potential affair is hardly groundbreaking fiction, while Martin's therapeutic relationship with a possible relative of his adopted daughter seems a bit contrived. The Brainwaves subplot seems better suited to a science fiction comedy. Maybe St. Aubyn decided to plow all the plot threads under and let the story grow as a wilding in the reader's mind. Only the hapless Abott struck me as an original character, but St. Aubyn has enough talent to have grown his other story fragments into a literary garden if he had set his mind to it.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS