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